Doppelgangers
by A.A. Pessimal
Summary: The Roundworld project is glitching again. Rincewind is a happy man. Elsewhere in the Multiverse, a nuclear physicist and reactor troubleshooter is having bad dreams. What happens when the two of them meet - again? Crosses eventually with "Good Omens".
1. Chapter 1

_**June, 1974. Port Arthur Airport, Texas.**_

The 707 bounced once, then its wheels kissed the tarmac and stayed firmly in contact with Planet Earth. The aircraft ran the length of the runway to its assigned stopping point, flanked by a solid phalanx of crash wagons, police cars, Airport security and inquisitive journalists. Unseen, but heard, radio messages zipped to and fro. Quite possibly the strangest ever commuter flight between Miami, FLA, and Port Arthur, TEX, had come to an end. One of the passengers, who was perhaps best placed to explain how crazy the flight had gotten, is currently sitting in a forward seat near the crew section, wrapped in a blanket and shivering, as the reaction set in to all that had happened. The fact he has just thwarted an attempt to hijack the aircraft – or so they tell him - is the _least_ of the crazy things.

The captain half-knelt next to the stewardess who was monitoring the Doctor's condition.

"We'll give you as long as you need, Doc, but there'll be a lot of people out there wanting a taste of you. Don't mind admitting that what you did saved my plane and a hundred-thirty people! And I'm grateful."

The Captain also stayed with the truth he could live with – that his plane had very narrowly escaped hijacking, maybe destruction in a bomb blast, because this unworldly-looking academic had walked forwards, lifted the bomb out that Arab guy's hands and stood there looking at it as if he'd never seen one before. That had caused just enough confusion for the airplane marshals to race in and take control, and then the situation was over…. The captain's brows furrowed in honest thought… or had it been? Something else had happened. But he, the Captain, aware of what violent decompression following a bomb burst could do to an aircraft at thirty-seven thousand feet, had been too busy getting the plane down to sea-level. Hell, he'd only bottomed out about a hundred-fifty over the Caribbean. And that was the crazy thing. Astro-navigation systems went offline, they'd recognised nothing. It was as if you'd parked the whole plane in someone else's planet, under someone else's skies. The compass had been heaving and jumping and refusing to play baseball, as if all of a sudden there were no such thing as a magnetic field for it to lock to. All radio went down in a static hiss. Communications with _everywhere_ had gone down, he'd been fighting to control the emergency descent, he could hear screaming from out back, Number One and the flight engineer had been grappling with that fucking maniac with the bomb…

…And then it had all shuddered, just as he was thinking _"Is this how Bermuda Triangle stories begin? All they'll ever know is that we went into a nose-dive and disappeared"_, and some sort of sanity had returned. The sirens silenced, the astronav started to recognize where it was again, and the blessed voice of Beaumont Control, Port Arthur, was on the radio.

"I'm ready. I think." The Doctor said. He stood up, unsteadily, throwing the blanket back, and with the stewardess on one side, and the other nuclear physician - what was his name, Zweiblumen? - anxiously supporting him on the other, went to the head of the ladder. There were cheers, and flashlights popping off. The hero had landed.


	2. Puzzlement at the HEM

_**The High-Energy Magic Building, Unseen University**_

"What do you _mean_, the Project refuses to accept him?" Ridcully demanded. "It's been perfectly willing to take Rincewind all this time. The man's chalked up more time in Roundworld than everyone else in this University put together!"

"We don't know, sir" Ponder Stibbons said, nervously. "The demonstrable fact is that when we get to a precise point in the human history of Roundworld, Rincewind is prevented from entering. This state lasts approximately between 1936 and 1987, in the consensus years of the human calendar. Which is a shame, as there are some aspects of the Second World War I'd quite like a skilled agent to study on the ground in some depth."

Ridcully looked blank. Stibbons prompted him. "That is to say, sir, the largest, ruinous, most bloodthirsty and implacably pitiless war in the human history of the Project."

"No hurry" Rincewind said, amicably. "I'm sure you can sort this out in the next, oooh, thirty years or so."

"Marked by its massive technological leaps ahead!". Stibbons said, sharply. "The human race began it in biplanes. Six years later, they were flying jets. They developed computers. Helicopters. Long-distance submarines. New clear power technology."

"Leonard of Quirm" said Rincewind, ticking them off on his fingers.. "HEX. Leonard. Leonard. Leonard. I'll go and talk to Len, if you like."

"All this is _vital_ to their getting off the planet before the ice age hits. The war was nasty, but it gave them every incentive to leap forward."

"No destructive war, no great leap into space, eh?" mused Ridcully.

"It would seem so, sir. Without the massive advances made in aircraft technology, there'd be no jet engines. Without the admittedly destructive uses the Germans intended for them, there'd be no space rockets. Without the need for a single destructive weapon capable of knocking an entire country into surrender, no new clear power. And the Patrician's keen for whatever civil engineering knowledge we can glean to make the Undertaking work better and more efficiently, so I've got HEX and the Librarian working on that."

"Government sponsorship, more fundin'. I'm _fully_ behind that, Stibbons!"

"Leonard of Quirm thought the new clear power could be sufficiently refined to make it a tool in large-scale civil engineering projects. I have my doubts . Which is why I want to take a close look at how this has been used in Roundworld."

"Ah yes, for shiftin' inconvenient mountains. Not the sort of big bang you'd want to let loose in a city!"

"I've sent the Patrician the files on the Roundworld cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sir. Although I regret not being able to send Rincewind in to take a look from up close… and look, Rincewind, we've been through this a hundred times. It's perfectly safe. You've been through worse! HEX mutes and softens any unpleasant sensations to the point where you are sensing mild analogues of the real thing."

"Well, unless it's before 1936 or after 1987, I'm off the hook, and somebody else can have all the mild analogues they want!" declared Rincewind. "Do call me when you've got this little problem sorted out!"

Whistling cheerfully, he left the HEM building.

"Drat, I hate a smug Rincewind." Ridcully declared. "It's not blasted well natural! Stibbons, so you think he's not tellin' the whole truth? Somethin', somewhere, in his past there is a reason for his not being able to enter the Project right now, and he knows more about it than we do?"

"I wouldn't doubt it, sir. He'd travelled the Disc - and, I believe, beyond - for a long time, and he's only put a small part of it on the record. I just wish there were a way of proving it. "


	3. The Doctor Dreams

_**Boston, Mass, June 1977**_

Dr. Avgust Rjinswind was a worried man. Years on from the ill-fated Flight 501 out of Miami, he was still having the dreams and the flashbacks. Something had happened on that plane. What, something MORE than just a demented hijacker threatening to blow it out of the sky? said the little voice inside. Yes, something _more_ than that, Dr Rijnswand said to himself, firmly. It had happened on board the plane, he was sure of it: the authorities had put it down to the suppressed group hysteria of a hundred and thirty people, who'd just dropped like a stone for more than thirty thousand feet, whilst knowing there was a bomb on board, in the hands of a deranged hijacker. If they _hadn't_ fantasized something surreal, some sort of primal image representing the danger they were in, said the voice of Authority, wouldn't it have been even more remarkable? Rijnswand wasn't an unreasonable man and this wasn't an unreasonable judgement; but there had been something more than that. He'd seen it.

He put down the design specs for the Magnox reactor with a sigh. They had been annotated all across with his increasingly terse notes, like "No! No!! No!!!" and "weak point here" and "Three dollars more can fix this before it blows and causes three billion dollars of damage!" and "Look, fellas, if three bucks is a problem I'll pay for it myself, OK?"

Oh, he knew how the Magnox principle was intended to work. All those potentially weak points in the design balanced themselves out, in that if any one blew, all manner of compensatory systems kicked in and worked that much harder to restore the overall balance of the reactor's performance.

But this was kind of dependent on only one, at most two, of those problem areas giving out _at any one time_. Rijnswand called this Titanic Engineering and it made him very angry. His growing fear was that sooner or later, a Magnox would catastrophically break down, with a cascade of problem feature after problem feature collapsing, in the manner of a big ship, hitherto complacently described as _unsinkeable_, having its guts ripped out by an iceberg.

He wondered how soon he'd see the iceberg and in what country.

He sighed, and reached for his guilty secret. Ursula LeGuin's latest novel about Pern. He liked dragons; he liked the idea of a world where science was minimal and principles that could be termed magical, perhaps bound into the orderly passage of the seasons, governed human reality. He banished the traitorous skeptical scientific voice that was making judgements as to the aeronautical implausibility of dragons, and started to read…

"_Dragons. Dragons are part of the puzzle!"_

He read le Guin avidly, relishing a simpler better-ordered world, until he began to feel tired. His shoulders dropped and his eyelids half-closed. He sensed rather than heard soft footfalls behind him, but relaxed into the gentle massage of his shoulders from strong caring fingers. He smelt her perfume, heard her voice.

"Come to bed, hon. Whatever's eating you up, we can work it out in bed."

"Red thread" he murmured, from one of several conflicting realities. "It's gonna fall here, babes. Magnox is a trap for it."

Connie smiled her reassuring smile. Rijnswand still wondered how he'd got her. That dark California tan and the platinum-blonde hair gave her an exotic beauty. Looking at her dark coffee-coloured skin, he wondered if some of her ancestors had arrived in the U.S.A. in a somewhat less than free condition. Either way, he'd met her in the lab at M.I.T. where he, the brilliant Swedish exchange scientist, had been pulling an all-nighter to make sense of the decay properties of Element 103. It all seemed to point to the long-rumoured _**island of stability**_, higher up the tree, where if we continued slowly and painfully constructing molecular amounts of ephemeral elements that lasted about as long as the Cheshire Cat's smile, we'd sooner or later, probably later, discover elements with longer and stabler half-lives you could read by your wristwatch, maybe even super-heavy stable ones where the deadly radioactivity faded out and which had mundane stability approaching that of iron or zinc or copper_. But these stable superheavy elements should already be here, existing in the world, and waiting for us to find them? _ Rijnswand's inner sceptic had protested. _Well, yeah, but think about it. They're the heaviest things out, right? And we live on a molten world with a thin crust on. Heavy things sink in a liquid environment. They'll be there, but God knows how many miles down._

And then she came in through the ceiling, the Environmental Warrior, masked and carrying ropes, sacks, belt, pouches.

"Oh, shit." she said, and rummaged in her gear. Rijnswand took a deep breath.

"About now, I need a coffee. The machine here isn't brilliant, but it's not exactly reindeercack either. Do you take sugar?"

She'd hesitatingly lowered the muzzle of the gun, then put it away. And the strangest night of Rijnswand's career had begun, as the nuclear engineer debated the pros and cons with the anti-nuclear protestor, who shyly informed him she'd broken in to steal aspects of Magnox High-Atom-Technology, the plans and blueprints if she could get them.

In the morning, he found her a white lab coat and introduced her to Security as a graduate researcher from back home in Jonnskipanskan. Oh, and somebody broke in last night, Jed. He dropped through that hole in the ceiling there and ran out into the corridor before I could stop him… As Security obligingly ran out into the corridor, Rijnswand said "Shall we go?" to his assistant, taking her arm gently and obligingly driving her nearby her home.

"You're not turning me in?" she said, suspiciously.

"It's more important to have a dialogue".

Connie half got out of the car, then hesitated, leant back in, and kissed him on the cheek.

"You're a hell of a guy, in your own quiet Swedish way, Prof."

And that's how it had begun.

Afterwards, Connie nuzzled his neck and murmured "And I was so close to dissing you as just another geek, you know, another nerdy Nigel? It all goes to show just how wrong you can be."

Wrapped in her warmth, he slept. And relived again.


	4. The Professor Dreams

_**The Library, Unseen University**_

Rincewind woke with a start in his tiny room above the Library. His heart hammered. Even in his dreams he ran from things. He had confused dream-images. That time he and Twoflower were escaping from the Wyrmberg on an imaginary dragon. And Twoflower had run out of imagination, and dragon, about forty thousand feet above the Circle Sea. The screaming. The falling. The view had been nice, taken objectively, but subjectively, he couldn't help reflecting that it was a view of a body of water he was soon going to impact from forty thousand feet up. Then Conina. Why Conina, she'd happened later, hadn't she? They'd been… she'd been…. naked…no clothes… then that feeling again of being two minds in one body and just a few seconds to reflect on being inside a metal tube strapped into a seat, looking at a girl in a uniform with an impossibly and to his mind indecently short skirt, and wondering why the language spoken was normal Morporkian with a Hublandish accent

-_What is this "English"?_

_-What is this "Hublandish"?_

_-And these outlandish tubes of cloth on my legs?_

_-And where are my comfortable trousers, why am I in a raggy old dressing gown?_

And in the confusion, to his horror, the Rincewind identity falling apart and tearing into confused shards with all memory of the Disc and the University and Ankh-Morpork going…

_Ankh-More pork_… something Fafard and the Grey Mouser encounter? The heaving stinking city of beggars in the Elric books? No, that was Nadsokar… Udrik was king bearing Hackmeat his cleaver, so who's Lord Veterinarian? Jesus, Avgust, you read too much fantasy sci-fi, it's getting into your dreams now..

As if there was a second voice in his head living a second life in an impossibly unimaginably different place and they were swirling together seeking mastery of one body.

Then….. extinction. Nothing. Then the racing cold again, but from much nearer to the sea this time with only seconds to gather his wits and get into a vertical diving position so it wouldn't sting so much when he hit.

It still stung.

And that feeling of, just for a few seconds, of having met a mind that in some indefinable way he could surely say was _his. _Poor bastard.

Rincewind sat bolt upright. His nerves tingled, his mind raced. If he smoked, he'd have been halfway into one by now. He sensed the Luggage stirring, ready to guard its Master.

"Nothing to worry about. Go back to sleep."

With a warm glow, Rincewind forced himself to recall the best bit. Conina. Naked and pleased to be with him, telling him he was no Nijel.

_Only in my dreams, eh…_


	5. On the Couch

_**The office of Dr Frazer Wading-Bird**__**1**__**, Boston, Mass. July 1977.**_

Jack Zweiblumen swung himself onto the analyst's couch. He is a small hunched man: in the melting pot which is the United States, he has the near-unique ethnic distinction of being Chinese Jewish. His mother's matzos in black bean sauce are to die for.

He knows these sessions are mandatory for IAEA trouble-shooters, just as they are, and for much the same reasons, as for bomb disposal squad members, and doesn't begrudge them: besides, medical insurance is paying. And ever since that _meschuggenah_ flight out of Miami, something just ain't been right. And not with Gus, either. He is worried for Gus.

He turned to face Dr Wading-Bird. "Been getting the dreams again lately, Doc."

"Tell me. I'm listening." said the psychiatrist.

"It's China. Least, everyone's speaking a language I know as Cantonese. A few odd local twists, but you expect that, right? Going by the clothes and the social relationships, it's five or six hundred years ago, maybe older. What disturbs me are these goddamn Japanese walking past in full ceremonial armour, assholes, as if they own China and they expect full bowing and scraping. That's kinda against my patriotic Chinese side, you know? My name's _Shuangren Huar, _which is Zweiblumen put into Chinese. Doublebloom, Twoflower. And I'm giving out copies of this book I wrote, very sly, silent, as if it's illegal. It IS illegal, because I remember the thing they do with a cheesegrater and a wire waistcoat. You would not, Doc, want to know what they do with a cheesegrater and a wire waistcoat. "

Zweiblumen swallowed, as if recalling a frightening memory.

"And then these godamn Japs .are punching and kicking their way through the crowd because they've seen me handing out these books. They get me, Doc, and they slap me around some. They're shouting and they're slapping and the chief shithead is waving the book in front of my face and slapping me alongside both cheeks with it. You know in Cantonese one of our words for _Japanese_ translates as exactly that – _shithead_? Says a lot for how many times those people have invaded China. Five hundred years ago we were using the word _shithead _to mean a samurai warrior, you know? "

"Normal healthy anal association." murmured the shrink. "Do go on. I'm listening."

"And I get beat up some more, then dragged in front of a Chinese, a warlord of the old kind, who's kinda _collaborating_ with these bastards, and this Lord Hong looks at me and says "we have the author. Excellent. Give him all the time and space he needs to write the sequel." and I get thrown into this cell. End of dream."

The psychiatrist exhaled.

"A textbook case, Jack. You really shouldn't be concerned. You're using racial and ethnic archetypes to work out a sense of guilt, maybe about surviving what could have been an air disaster. A part of your head is wondering why you survived when so many other people die every year in airplane crashes. And your ethnic makeup is interesting too. As a general rule, Jewish people are prone to irrational feelings of guilt. It comes with the _briss_. The survivor guilt is a thing we see so often in Jews, especially ones who came out of Europe. Your father's Swiss, isn't he? Again you're agonizing about having lived when so many others died in Himmler's camps. But because your mother is Chinese, you aren't populating your dreams with Nazi stormtroopers, as we might expect and I so often see. You're drawing the archetypes of State control and repression and imprisonment from her experiences in Hong Kong under the Japanese."

"I see that, Doc" Zweiblumen nods, uncertainly.

"And in your profession, you're dramatizing another fear, too. The language of dreams is so often the language of low puns, Jack. Isn't one of the biggest fears of a nuclear reactor troubleshooter that one day you'll encounter the big uncontrollable one? What your trade calls _China Syndrome?"_

Zweiblumen winced. The doctor nodded, satisfied in his diagnosis.

"I'm giving you a full bill of mental health, Jack. You're working out your fears and neuroses in a perfectly acceptable way through your dreams. There's nothing to be concerned about. Same time in six months?"

1 Because I'd be sued if I said "Dr Frazier Crane", that's why.


	6. The Ambassador's Reception 1

**Unseen University** was playing host to the visiting delegation from Agatea. For the first time, it pleased the Emperor that there should be a permanent Embassy in the city of Ankh-Morpork, and he sent his good and trusted friend the Lord Shuangren Huar to represent the Empire and its people in those lands ruled by the Lord Havelock Vetinari.

Vetinari has asked the University not to stint on the catering, as he finds well-fed diplomats to be easier to deal with than lean and hungry ones.

In consequence, the Great Hall is full of impatiently hungry Wizards and other civic dignitaries, the seating arrangement carefully worked out to reflect the relative importance of the Guild and the person.

Rincewind was not surprised that his table was well out on the fringes, shared with a surprisingly pleasant young teacher from the Assassins' School, a middle-ranking member of the guild of Plumbers and Dunnikindivers, one of Harry King's trusted night-soil men, the deputy head of the Guild of Tanners, and the Lancrastrian Ambassador. He looked across to High Table: yup, Ridcully, all the rest of the Faculty including Ponder Stibbons, the various Guild luminaries such as Downey, Boggis, Rosie Palm and Queen Molly, the Duke of Ankh scowling as if he wanted to arrest the entire table just for making him wear the costume, Lady Sybil, Lady de Meserole, Selachii, Venturi, Eorle, Rust…a few vacant seats, but they'd be filled when the Patrician and the Agatean dignities arrived. Rincewind looked at the empty seat on his table. They'd been warned to expect one of the lesser members of the Agatean party, and that Rincewind might be needed to interpret.

Rincewind sat back and grinned. This thing with the Roundworld Project suddenly rejecting him as if he was.. he was.. some sort of _virus_.. was doing him just fine at the moment. he hadn't a clue why, except that he'd been dreaming and flashing back a lot to that awful moment with Twoflower, just after escaping the Wyrmberg and just before finding himself bobbing to the top of the Circle Sea trying to cough quite a lot of it out of his lungs and stomach. In between, there'd been that confused hallucination of being _inside _the dragon, only to find a metal tube with people inside strapped into seats. Then that moment of being two minds in one body. Then the scarifying dissolution of Rincewind into the essence of the other.

This had always puzzled Rincewind as it had been so far beyond his experience, yet it had had a strong reality to it, as if it had been more than just hallucination. He had, with an effort, succeeded in forcing the memory out of his mind over the intervening years: and then the Roundworld Project had started. As an unwilling visitor to the Roundworld, sent in as agent and observer, Rincewind had visited in what to the human inhabitants had been the year 1997. He had been sent to investigate air travel. After a series of amusing misunderstandings in Terminal One at Heathrow, over the need for tickets, passports and other documentation, leading to his being dragged bodily to a cell by large burly security guards pointing _gonnes_ at his head, HEX had extricated him and loaded him directly on board a plane travelling to Germany. Rincewind had followed the smiling directions of the short-skirted attendant to turn right on entering….

…and his knees had wobbled and given way. He was in a metal tube. A claustrophobic metal tube. With seats. Each seat had straps. People were obediently strapping themselves in. He had gibbered his way down the aisle: one of the girls in the indecently short skirts (although still longer than last time, he noted. Whoa… _Last time_?) had said "first flight, sir?" with some concern, and had stayed to reassure him that it gets some people like this. _He'd been here before_. Or at least, in a place like this before. He thought of asking Hex, or Stibbons. But what could he say? He kept it to himself. During the flight, memories surfaced. Even a name. Rijnswand. Almost but not quite his, just as the other personality in the outlandish clothes had been almost but not quite him. Rincewind felt, intuitively, this was priceless knowledge and not to be squandered on Stibbons. What it meant, he didn't know. But he'd find out.

He smiled at the Assassin, one of the new generation of female teachers at their school. He was so terrified at sharing the table with somebody who, if the fancy took her, could inhume him in any one of a thousand different ways, that it had come full circle and he was really quite relaxed.

"Do tell me more about the Roundworld Project, Professsor" she invited him. "I teach archaeology and history. I'd really like to be accepted onto an interdisciplinary study group and see it for myself, as I understand a variety of interesting civilizations evolved there. Not all of them human. They must have left a really interesting record behind!"

Rincewind, relaxed, started talking about the sentient crabs and the intelligent lizards that had created civilizations and cities. He also recalled a Patrician-level decision that no Assassin was to be allowed anywhere near civilizations that had evolved _gonnes,_ which in practice restricted them from most of Roundworld's human history. He also noted that she was really quite strikingly attractive, reminding him of the delicacy of new potatoes and the deep vibrant colours and textures of the potato plant with its small delicate pastel flowers.

Rincewind "hmmmph'd" and cleared his throat.

Alice… I'm quite an important man on the Roundworld project. I might be able to pull a string or two…. Get you into one of the special suits. Show you a few places I know." _Bloody Stibbons owes me a pile of favours as tall as the Tower of Art by now, _Rincewind thought_. And even he might see that an expert archaeologist is an asset to research, as she'll see things we've missed…_

"Wonderful!" the lady Assassin bounced with excitement. "The archaeology of a different civilization in a different world! I suppose you could say it's a date, then!"

Rincewind flushed slightly. Had he really just asked a trained killer from the Assassins' Guild out on a date…. And in as many words, had she just said "yes"?

A loud fanfare interrupted them.

The university's Chief Bledlow, acting as Master of Ceremonies, marched in in his ceremonial uniform, and announced

"MY LORDS! LADIES! AND GENTLEMEN! PRAY BE STANDING AND SILENT FOR HIS GRACE HAVELOCK VETINARI, BY GRACE OF THE GODS PATRICIAN OF ANKH-MORPORK! BE RESPECTFUL ALSO FOR LADY ROBERTA DE MESEROLE, PRVIY COUNCILLOR TO THE PATRICIAN!

AND HIS EXCELLENCY MY LORD SHUANGREN HUAR, LORD OF THE DOUBLE BLOOM, AMBASSADOR TO THE CITY OF ANKH-MORPORK FROM THE ETERNAL EMPIRE OF AGATEA!"

Rincewind goggled. That small figure. That endearing look of four-eyed placidity. The glasses. Lord of the doubled bloom my bum. That's Twoflower!

The Bledlow went on enumerating names and positions of the Agatean party. As they were named, flunkeys led them to their assigned tables. Still goggling over Twoflower being the Ambassador, Rincewind almost missed…

…"Ah, Great Wizard. It has been a long time."

Rincewind sniffed the air. An all too familiar perfume. He groaned, inwardly. There she was, in ceremonial kimono, beautiful as a naked razor, lethal as a _naginata_. Still looking at Rincewind as if she'd be only too pleased to perform that thing they do with a wire waistcoat and a cheesegrater, On Rincewind.

"Pretty Butterfly. Hi."

"Greetings. You will be so kind as to introduce?"

Rincewind made the introductions.

"His Excellency…."

"Lars Yttrium-finder" said the dwarf. "This month's Lancrastian ambassador"

"This month's?" inquired the lady Assassin.

"There are three of us, ma'am. Back home there are three kings, see. Verence for the humans, the Lord Of the Mountain for the trolls, and our own King Ironfounder. The three kings got together and decided that since Ankh-Morpork is an expensive place, there was no point in sending three Ambassadors. So we rotate. At the moment it's me, but if a troll or a human from back home came to me with a problem, I'm still their Ambassador, and I report back to all three kings. Same when a troll is Ambassador, or a human.. Anyway, it's a part-time job. I work down the depot, handling the ore and coal shipments at this end for King Ironfounder as they arrive".

"I see. I'm Alice Band. Asassins' Guild."

"Much honoured, Lady Killer." The girl bowed deep. "I am Pretty Butterfly. Ninjitsu. What do you know of Agatean martial arts?"

"We have a dojo and a sensei at the Guild. I wouldn't say I'm proficient, but I have studied."

"I would be honoured to try your strength and guile, Lady Killer."

"It would be my honour to show you our dojo, Ninjitsu-san. We can fight each other in a spirit of peace."

Rincewind blinked. Something he wasn't exactly au fait with was happening here, but it seemed as if Pretty Butterfly and Alice Band were regarding each other with all the respect and single-mindedness that he, Rincewind, would give to a plate of baked potatoes.

The man from the Plumbers' Guild patted him on the arm, consolingly. He leant across and whispered _Not interested in boys!_ into Rincewind's ear. Rincewind goggled slightly, as the first of sixteen elims dropped to make a penny (1).

"_You mean, she's a….?"_ he mouthed back.

"_Blue Cat Club. Ladies Section."_ was the mouthed response.

Deflated, Rincewind sat down, reflecting that it was just his luck. Not only knocked back in favour of somebody else, but that the lady turns out to be en _embankment_ and a _holder-back of water_. It explained a lot about Butterfly, though: her disdain for men and the aura of _something other_ about her. Why hadn't he seen that earlier? The last elim sadly dropped and joined its fifteen fellows, who were all pleased as they hadn't seen it in ooh, _years_, and you finally worked it out about Pretty Butterfly, then. We were wondering when you'd twig.

* * *

(1) Rincewind has been unkindly described as being slow on the uptake as regards crucial observations. This is not true at all. The same penny drops for Rincewind as for everybody else – it's just that Rincewind's penny has to drop as sixteen separate elims. This necessarily takes longer.


	7. The ambassador's Reception 2

Meanwhile, on High Table, the new Ambassador was enjoying his evening.

"Is everything to your liking, your Excellency?" Ridcully enquired.

Twoflower took another sip of his wine. "Extremely so, Arch-chancellor. But there's one person I can't see. Apparently all your Faculty is up here on this High Table, apart from my old friend Rincewind".

Ridcully winced. Vetinari raised a disapproving eyebrow at him.

"Yes, Ambassador. The Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography _is_ somewhat conspicuous by his absence on this table." he said, pointedly. "No doubt Arch-chancellor Ridcully can make good the omission".

"Oh, there'll be plenty of time to catch up with Rincewind later." Twoflower said. "I need to get to grips with this business of being an Ambassador first. I have to say, the Emperor, may his feet be cleansed in the finest aromatherapy oils for all eternity, was quite insistent it should be me."

"Oh, yes" said Vetinari, thoughtfully. "The new Emperor."

"He said – it's in my Letters of Authority, I believe, my Lord? - said to me that I was the ideal man for the job. I've been to this city before, I have friends and contacts here, I speak the language, I can use that conniving little weasel Rincewind for information, and anyway I've toured half the Disc with him, and beyond, so we have an Understanding. Oh, I know that was down to your predecessor telling him that if he lost me he'd be handed over to the Palace torturers for practice, but I do fancy myself that we became close friends."

"Beyond?" Ponder Stibbons was intrigued.

"Anyway, Excellency, your daughter was quite insistent she should be seated at Rincewind's table. We could accommodate that, at least! Close friends, are they? I've noticed Rincewind has a peculiar effect on young women!"

"Pretty Butterfly looked after his welfare during his visit to Agatea, certainly. Which the Emperor notes you dispatched him on, Arch-chancellor."(1)

"_Beyond_?" Stibbons said again, trying to get attention.

"She was keen to see him again. To throw a small pebble in the tranquil pool of his dharma, she said."

"Indeed, Excellency." Vetinari said, drily. "I understand you accompanied Professor Rincewind while he did most of the fieldwork qualifying him to pronounce, at Professorial level, exactly how cruel and egregious Geography can be!"

"Oh, and the stories I could tell!"

"Errrm… Mr Ambassador?"

"Stibbons! Out with it, man! You've been repeatin' the word "beyond" for some time now!"

"Professor Stibbons, isn't it? You're the clever chap who set up that HEX machine. I'd love to see it! And I hear about the Roundworld project, a whole alternative universe in a glass sphere?"

Stibbons bloomed under the praise.

"I hope to fulfil both requests, your Excellency. But just now, you said you'd traveled _beyond_ the Disc with Rincewind?"

"And this is important, Stibbons?" Ridcully harrumphed.

"Please. Yes, Professor, I believe I left the Disc twice in Rincewind's company. On the first occasion, we left the repressive island state of Krull by stealing the discovery ship they were proposing to fly off the edge of the Disc. Apparently, the Great Spell that had lodged inside Rincewind's brain brought us back, and spared us from death in the cold airless vastness of deep space."

"Ah yes. Time of the Red Star. Rincewind saved the world for the first time and let it go to his head, damned man"

"On a second occasion, and this was far stranger still, we escaped from the Wyrmberg on the back of a noble dragon. Which apparently I'd conjured into being, helped by the massive residual magic field in that area. But that magic was only local to the Wyrmberg, so the further away we got, the more tenuous that dragon became. And Ninereeds…. that is, my dragon… was flying upwards as well as outwards. And I lost consciousness in those high frozen airs, so Rincewind reckoned. Ninereeds disappeared, and we fell."

"Yet, you survived the fall and lived?"

"We apparently did so! I awoke coughing out water and clinging to my Luggage for dear life. Then we were "rescued" by pirates, but that's a different story. Rincewind told me later that we both materialized inside some sort of metal dragon. Inside its tube-shaped guts, strapped into rows of seats, looking out through tiny windows at a sea that was getting nearer and nearer, from a great distance above. He said I was strapped down next to him, but asleep. In the background was a great roaring noise, but muted. He also talked about maidens in indecently short skirts walking up and down tending to the people strapped down"

"I'm SURE that bugger goes to Rosie Palm's! No moral fibre!" Ridcully exploded. "No wonder he's so thin and pale. "Been spendin' time at Rosie's special parties!"

"Please, sir!" said Stibbons, pre-empting a protest from Rosie herself. "This is important. Continue, please, Ambassador?"

"Rncewind said there was shouting and screaming and then the metal dragon just fell. The girls in the short skirts were all thrown to the Down end, and the dragon didn't even its floor out till it got very near the sea.

He said, and this is the strange part, he felt as if he were already on the _plane _– he called it a _plane_, not a metal dragon - and the people talked a language almost like Morporkian. His name wasn't Rincewind, but something almost like it, and mine wasn't Twoflower, it was… _Zweiblumen._ That's it. Überwaldean, isn't it? Meaning Doublebloom. Twoflower. And then a few things happened that Rincewind couldn't quite recall, and the Luggage appeared. You'd think the people had never seen an Agatean traveling case before! And then we were in the Sea waiting for rescue."

Stibbons paused.

"Sir, that's it! Rincewind's been to Roundworld before! Remember how he described the inside of the _plane_ at Heathrow? He went white and looked ill, as if he'd seen it or something like it before. I thought he was holding something back! And if I'm right, sir, the Ambassador's _also_ been to Roundworld."

Ponder Stibbons looked up. "Sir, I think I've solved the problem! Why there's a glitch in Roundworld where we can't get Rincewind in. _It's because he's already there!"_

"And so is the ambassador" Ridcully mused. He triumphantly bellowed "Stibbons! We've got the bastard! No, not _you_, Excellency, apologies. Mr Twoflower, you wanted to see Roundworld? How soon could you manage a visit?"

* * *

(1) See _**Interesting Times**_.


	8. The Doctor dreams again

Avgust Rijnswand is asleep again. He is seeing a grand dinner, in some sort of crazy candle-lit Gothic hall. He sees himself, in a battered once-red robe and pointy hat, hair draggled and neglected, wearing the same sort of thin wispy beard he'd had till Connie, whose legitimate day job was as a hairdresser, shaved it off for him. He sees Jack Zweiblumen, in ornate Chinese robes, sitting as guest of honor at the Highest Table. He hears scraps of conversation:

_. You'd think the people had never seen an Agatean traveling case before!_

_Rincewind's been to Roundworld before! Remember how he described the inside of the plane at Heathrow?_

_Why there's a glitch in Roundworld where we can't get Rincewind in. It's because he's already there!"_

_We've nailed the bloody bugger! Excellent! _

Avgust Rijnswand's conscious core is then whipped across a crazy-looking city, like a European city five hundred years ago, to a place where there is commotion. A yard has been boarded off and is a stockade for some sort of animal, milling around aimlessly… he draws closer and sees the legs. Each box has hundreds and hundreds of dear little legs. They have backed a screaming man against a wall.

Also screaming, Avgust Rijnswand's mind returns to its correct time and place. Thus he wakes up to Connie's love and concern, and does not witness the last moments of Umberto Boggis, a Thief who is trying his luck at the Agatean Embassy, while they're all up at the beanfeast at the Uni.


	9. Be warned Here be slash

Rincewind sleeps the sleep of the man who, although his fading romantic ambitions have been further shredded, has at least caught up with an old friend and had a few beers with him. For Twoflower insisted his old friend be brought to the High Table after dinner to take a drink with him, and one beer became two, then two became three. He sleeps deeply and happily, and again begins to dream…

Avgust Rijnswand lies back in Connie's encircling arms, telling her his dream.

"The place was like old Gothenburg, honey. The old city they keep for the tourists. But it smelt worse than G-burg ever smelt, even in the old days of the Vasa kings. And there were no TV aerials on the roofs, no cables, no phone wires, no street lights, just a real life burning torch in a bracket on the wall every so often, like in the old Frankenstein movies. Hell, I was expecting Igor to scuttle by carrying a spade and some brains in a bucket!"1

Connie smoothed his hair with more love and concern. He leant back into the warm woman-smelling softness of her breasts.

"Then I saw them." He paused. Objectively, a wooden box propelled by lots and lots of dear little legs was absurd. It was stupid. So why should it also be terrifying?

"The box? With legs? Like you saw on the plane?"

"Go ahead. Laugh." He said, bitterly.

"Hon, do you see me laughing?" she said with infinite concern. "It's an image that scares you. Let me tell you I get bad dreams about hats.".

"Hats?"

"This great big conical red hat with jewels on it. A floppy brim and everything. Makes me think of the sinister wizard, when you open up _**Led Zeppelin IV?**_ It's intelligent. It speaks to me. It makes me do things. I'm scared of it when it appears in my dreams. I saw it freeze a guy to death with blue fire. His body shattered. Like ice."

"Maybe my box could eat your hat."

She giggled. "Or trample over it!" She paused, and slipped out from behind him.

"And speaking of eating… I know what the Doctor needs to settle him down for the night!"

Rijnswind watched her peel her nightdress off and over her head, revealing the naked body underneath. Connie's breasts bounced and jostled. He felt his penis stir even before she took it into her mouth, teasing and flicking her tongue around it as it hardened to her touch. He felt her soft excited breath against his pubic hair and lower belly.

Meanwhile, Rincewind dreams. Alice Band's face fades into Pretty Butterfly's. She becomes Neilette, the tomboyish girl from Fourecks. Neilette's face flickers, then becomes Bethan's. Bethan fades in turn and becomes Conina.

And remains Conina.

Rincewind feels certain unmistakeable physiological changes happening to the lower part of his body. He isn't sure if he is asleep or awake, and he wonders briefly if he's attracted a succubus. But the dream takes more and more solid form until…

He is in a softly-lit room in a soft warm bed. This is not as immediately obvious to him as the awareness that he is rocking and thrusting his hips against a warm soft body which is thrusting and pushing herself back up at him. He feels as if his penis is a finger encased in a warm, wet, yielding, glove. He hears the panting of her mounting excitement. Naturally cynical, he worries about opening his eyes just in case the world is playing another mean trick on him and his partner in the act of love turns out to be… Miss Maccalariat from the Post Office, maybe. Or Queen Molly of the Beggars. But then, would the first ever consent to such a sticky disgusting act as sex, and would the latter smell as sweet and fragrant as this? He feels smooth well-muscled legs moving against his flanks and crossing behind his back, then moving down to lock behind his own legs and push up against the mattress.

He hears her panting _yesohyesohyesohyesohyesmy lovely Rincie, my Rincewind, my Viking, pillage me!_

He opens his eyes and blinks. The naked body underneath his is Conina. Beautiful, brown, glistening.

Better make the most of this dream, then.

Avgust Rijnswind, feeling the delicious spurting wetness as his wife climaxes underneath him, cries "Oh Gods…oh Gods!" It's too late for him to stop doing what he is doing, but he has an uneasy feeling he isn't alone. He feels the strong rippling muscular contractions of her orgasm nearly forcing him out of her as he continues to thrust against the resistance.

Connie arches her back, bucks and screams. Rincewind is looking down, filing every inch of her naked body for leisurely recollection later. Rijnswind looks at his wife's familiar body with love and adoration. He frowns slightly. It felt like an echo, two halves of himself slightly out of synch with each other.. then he gives himself to the moment again.

_Rincie I love you so much… oh, stop, stop, stop for a moment, please…_

He pulls out of her, reluctantly, still hard and glistening with her juices.

Connie rolls over on the bed and lifts a perfectly shaped bottom to him, waggling it temptingly. Rincewind seizes the moment, after some adoration, to take her hips, adjust their positions slightly, and penetrate her wetness again. Her hips begin to push back against his thrusts, and he tries to angle her so that he can watch their reflections in a mirror, watch her breasts dangle and bounce with every thrust.

Rijnswind is perplexed. He has no memory of penetrating her from the rear, and he isn't normally the sort of voyeur who gets pleasure from mirrors in the bedroom. _Standard fittings at Rosie Palm's, _thinks a thought which is not his.

Rincewind doesn't want this dream to end. In dreams, he has no gloomy inhibitions. He allows Conina to push him on his back and straddle him. She pushes down hard on his penis, taking the length of it inside her wetness, then she rides him, rotating her hips, pushing up and down, the whole of her beautiful toned body open to view.

Rincewind hears his voice say "Wait, hon, I'm going to come!"

_No! Not yet! I'm enjoying it too much! _

Then he sees what she is prepared to do, with her mouth, to allow him one memorable orgasm to her three. Rincewind comes, looking into Conina's eyes, and the scene fades out around him…

…leaving him sweaty and aware it hadn't all been a dream, in his shabby room at the Library.

He looks for something to clean up with.

_One day. One day. I swear I'll have one of those in company!_

He wishes he could smoke. A little part of him has just realized that cigarettes were _made_ for moments like this.

"You were amazing, hon" Conina whispers, as they laid in the rumpled sex-smelling dampened bed, and shared a cigarette. "It was like there were two of you in there, each one pushing the other further and further!"

Rijnswind nodded, happy and tired. Even though it HAD - uncomfortably - felt like there were two of him in there. He wondered about booking a session with the company shrink…

"So.. it's a hat for you? A wizard's hat?"

She snuggled.

"Ah-huh. But sometimes I see this shabby, dirty, hat, like a hobo wizard might wear, and it even has "WIZZARD" written on it, and the guy wearing it is kinda like you, and it makes me warm inside 'cos it's you wearing it? Hey, maybe we should wear the costumes when we make out next, like in D&D! You the wizard and me… a thief. Yes, a thief! That's how we first met, you the wizard in your alchemist's lab turnin' stuff into other stuff, and I came in as the thief, to steal your secrets!"

"The HAT. Literally. High Atom Technology!"

They laugh together, and eventually sleep. Although Avgust Rijnswind is worried that there might not be many more nights like this. Somewhere in the world, there's a ticking Magnox…

1 Had Rijnswand's psychic essence lingered longer near Small Gods cemetery, he would almost certainly have seen an Igor scuttle furtively by…


	10. The truth is revealed at the HEM

_**Chapter eleven – at the HEM testing the case that doppelgangers **_

_**exist.**_

It was shortly after ten in the morning on the following day. Stibbons took a deep breath and addressed the assembled Wizards and guests.

"Thank you for attending, ladies and gentlemen. We are here today because we have the great honour of demonstrating the Roundworld Project to His Exellency the Agatean Ambassador. We also welcome representatives from the Guild of Archaeologists and Guild of Historians who will form part of the inter-disciplinary group, offering their professional skills to advise on aspects of the Project which lie within their areas of academic interest."

What Stibbons very carefully did not enunciate was that Ridcully, a habitual early riser despite the rigours of his night before, had awoken Stibbons at six with the imprecation "Come on, lad, let's be havin' you! I need your brains. We need to work through those interestin' insights you had at High Table last night, durin' the ambassador's reception!"

Groaning, Stibbons had struggled into his robe and pointy hat, to discover that Big Mad Drongo and other members of the research team had similarly been pressganged into early morning service.

Ridcully had strode into the HEM, bellowing "Good mornin', Mr HEX! Are you up and ready for some thinkin'? Because I need some answers!"

++GOOD MORNING, ARCH-CHANCELLOR++ PLEASE STATE YOUR QUERY++

"Rincewind. Who is temporarily unable to enter Roundworld. Which is a bloody nuisance and an irritation, as the smug devil's sniggerin' up his sleeve at me. Any answers?"

++STILL COMPUTING.++

Stibbons gathered his thoughts.

"HEX. I have a working hypothesis for your consideration. Last night, we discovered a few new facts about the wizard Rincewind that he has very carefully neglected to disclose. Over twenty years ago, during his travels round the Discworld, an emergency occurred where we believe he and a companion were temporarily removed from our universe into a parallel dimension in order to save their lives. When the emergency was over, they were returned to our local area of the space-time continuum. Circumstantial evidence suggests the host dimension was Roundworld, or something very like it. Yet the conundrum is that we did not initiate the Roundworld Project until a little over three years ago?"

++PLEASE PROVIDE FURTHER DETAIL ++ I MAY BE ABLE TO PROVE OR DISPROVE THE HYPOTHESIS ++ AT PRESENT, INSUFFICIENT DETAIL.

Stibbons and Ridcully went back over all they could remember about Twoflower's disclosure the previous night, until HEX's readout swished the quill pen to read

++COMPUTING++ STAND BY++

And the hourglass dropped and began turning.

"What's the dratted machine up to?" Ridcully hissed, in a penetrating stage whisper. The ear-trumpet that had previously belonged to Windle Poons twitched in their direction and the quill pen scratched:-

++THE DRATTED MACHINE IS TALKING TO THE PRIMITIVE COMPUTER INTELLIGENCES IN ROUNDWORLD ++ IT IS SEARCHING THEIR DATABANKS FOR REPORTS OF STRANGE AND ANOMOLOUS OCCURENCES ON BOARD CIVIL AIRLINERS IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD ++ THE DRATTED MACHINE HAS FOUND A LIST OF POSSIBILITIES ++ PLEASE REFER TO OMNISCOPE SCREEN++ PRINT-OUTS WILL FOLLOW++

"I think you hurt his feelings, sir" said Big Mad Adrian, reprovingly.

Ridcully's mouth opened and closed a couple of times.

"Er… sorry, that man" he said, patting the desktop fondly.

++ THINK NOTHING OF IT, ARCH-CHANCELLOR++

Stibbons read, doubtfully,

"_A pilot with Russian state airline Aeroflot was grounded after seeing little green fairies dancing on the wings of his TU-122 airliner on a routine internal flight between Leningrad and Novosibersk. The company doctor who examined Captain Chernofski attributed it to his two bottles of vodka per day habit, said this was a little bit excessive, and recommended the Captain reduce his alcohol intake to one bottle a day_…"1

"Not _quite_ what we're looking for here, Hex" said Ridcully. "Think that could have been down to elves muckin' around there, Stibbons?"

Wait, sir…" Stibbons said, clutching Ridcully's sleeve. "Look at _this_ one…"

The wizards were familiar enough with the concept of newspapers, thanks to the Ankh-Morpork Times. This one was headed PORT ARTHUR EXAMINER and datelined for June 24th, 1974.

_**NUCLEAR PROF HERO IN SKYJACKING TERROR!**_

_**Strange events on flight 501 out of Miami**_

_**Modest hero said he would do it again if he had to**_

The wizards read, jaws dropping. The photograph of Dr Rijnswand, with his long lean face, big worried eyes, and straggly red-blond hair and beard, was the icing on the cake of proof.

"_That's him!" _Ridcully whooped. "That's bloody Rincewind! We've got him!"

"Hmmm"… muttered Ponder, reading on. "_Some passengers claimed to have seen a bizarre apparition of a wooden box with legs running down the aisle. This was later put down to a shared hallucination brought about by sudden decompression and the mental and emotional stress of falling for thirty-five thousand feet in an aircraft with a bomb on board. _Sir! Even his bloody LUGGAGE crossed dimensions! "

"HEX! Print-out and scan, if you please!" barked Ridcully. As the demon in the iconograph was lowered and focused to scan and copy the image on the omniscope2, the wizards conferred.

"This chap is the absolute dead spittin' image of Rincewind!" Ridcully declared. So assumin' Rincewind hasn't been living some secret second life in there…"

"Hardly, Archchancellor"

"Then he has a double on Roundworld."

++ A DOPPELGANGER ++

"Say again?"

++ IT IS AN OLD, OLD, WORD, DESIGNATING A STATE OR CONDITION WHERE IDENTICAL DUPLICATES COME INTO BEING ++ NORMALLY THEY ARE UNAWARE OF EACH OTHER'S PRESENCE, BUT IN TIMES OF GREAT EMOTIONAL STRESS, DURESS, OR ELATION THE BARRIERS MAY BREAK DOWN AND THEY WILL LEAK INTO EACH OTHER'S PYSCHIC SPACE ++ I HYPOTHESISE THAT OUR RINCEWIND AND THE RIJNSWAND OF THE ROUNDWORLD ARE SO LINKED ++

Ridcully and Stibbons looked at each other.

"Then… if the psychic space on Roundworld, into which we usually send Rincewind, is occupied by his…doppelganger… " Stibbons said, slowly working it out, "it means that in normal circumstances, there is no place for Rincewind, and he is bounced back out again."

++ I SO HYPOTHESISE.++

++ NEW INFORMATION ++

++ NEW INFORMATION ++

"Yes, man?" Ridcully barked, impatiently.

++ I HAVE THE PASSENGER MANIFEST FOR FLIGHT 501 OUT OF MIAMI ON THE 23RD JUNE 1974 ++

++ THAT IS, THE LIST OF HUMANS ABOARD THAT AIRCRAFT++ IT ALSO LISTS A JACK ZWEIBLUMEN ++

Stibbons worked it out.

"Twoflower? Rincewind's traveling companion? The ambassador?"

++ HIS DOPPELGANGER, CERTAINLY ++ THIS HYPOTHESIS MAY NOW BE TESTED, NOW THAT THERE IS A SECOND ++

Ridcully grinned. "Will it cause a diplomatic incident, d'you think, Stibbons, if we get Mr Ambassador to suit up and be our guinea-pig?"

"Not at all, sir. He's a travelling man, after all. He'd jump at the chance!"

And now, later in the morning, they are all here. Stibbons is running through the standard omniscope presentation, all light and sound, of the formation and history of the Roundworld, although he has deliberately omitted the creation moment where the Dean put his fingers inside and waggled them around a bit. While the civic dignitaries are marvelling at the PR presentation, Ridcully has what for him is a discreet chat with an errant wizard.

"Gnnnh…" Rincewind spluttered, as the Arch-chancellor slammed him into the wall by his collar.

"Don't run away, laddie. You're bloody buggeringly well _rumbled_!"

Ridcully brandished the morning's printouts from HEX in front of Rincewind's nose.

"Care to explain?"

Rincewind goggled at the face that was his. The name that was almost his. The account of the Luggage bursting into existence and causing pandemonium on board a civil flight from Miami to Texas.

The helpfully provided map of the journey showing the bulk of it was across a sea with a nearly regular, circular, coast, as if an even bite had been taken out of the land. It all fitted.

"Well, there was this time with Twoflower when…" and he told the story as fully as he could. Ridcully, who knew when to ease the pressure, nodded and said "Now don't you feel so much better for telling your academic mentor!"

"And that's it?"

"No, we're going to perform a little scientific experiment. Walk this way!"

_I knew it,_ thought Rincewind. _One ecstatically good dream last night, and now real life comes in like an unlicenced thief with a cudgel. Back to normal, then. _

He followed Ridcully, meekly. He could see no alternative.

1 This actually happened. I'm not making this one up!

2 Advertising slogan: _PictImp 2000 – we do away with brushes! Fast, accurate, pointilliste, finger-painting! Digital iconography, the modern way to a perfect picture!_


	11. Sliding down the catastrophe curve

_**April, 1979**_

"Hi, buddy!" Jack Zweiblumen's voice is loud and reassuring on the phone.

"Hey, Jack!" Avgust Rijnswand replied. "Long time, no hear! Connie asks if we're anywhere nearer a Mrs. Zweiblumen yet?"

"Well, there's this broad in the Big Apple. She fulfils most of the textbook symptoms of breakaway marital phenomena, 'cept for the ring."

"And there's a broad in Poughkeepsie, New Jersey. And there's a broad in Rhode Island. And when you're out that way there's a broad in New Mexico, too!"

"You know me, Gus. Just keeping my options open! 'Sides, ever since the shrink started talking about guilt being a racial and ethnic thing , I gave it some creative thought as to how I could use it for mental healing. It's amazing, Gus, how many German broads will give it up to a Jew out of a sense of guilt over what her grandfather did!"

Rijnswand laughs, appreciatively. "Does it work on the Japanese as well? Your Chinese side must be owed a guilt complex or two!"

"The shitheads? No sense of shame or guilt. But it don't stop me trying! A real shame you Swedes ain't never oppressed anyone anywhere and you ain't never _been_ oppressed. Sortofa no-scoring game there."

"Maybe the Finns. We beat up on them a lot. But we stopped oppressing people and beating up on them about three hundred years ago."

Jack laughed, and got on to business.

We've got our next assignment, Gus. It's a Magnox. IAEA and EPA ain't happy with it, and need it checking out."

Avgust Rijnswind felt the colour draining from his cheeks.

"Preliminary reports suggest slack management and maintenance procedures. Poorly trained staff. History of few and poorly conducted emergency drills. Management needs to know where the problems are so as to set remedial measures in place".

"And where is our rogue reactor?"

"Right in our patch, Gus, North-Eastern USA. Pennsylvania."

Distractedly, Rijnswand jotted down the necessary details. Then, phone call concluded, he went to pack his traveling bags. He had a bad feeling. It made him feel like one of those wartime bomber pilots who knew in advance he wouldn't be coming back from this one. He took a leaf from their book and reached for pen and paper. With a mind and a writing style more used to scientific peer papers, he began a last letter to Connie, intending to lodge it with Pastor Ridculleigh at the Swedish Lutheran Church. Hugh would ensure it got back to Connie, if he didn't.

Elsewhere, Jack Zweiblumen packs for his trip, thinking back to the last time he got his oats, with Sue in Chinatown. Goddamn it, he'd almost have thought somebody else had been in his head, as an interested spectator. He wondered if Gus ever had that feeling when he was with Connie, in the marital sense, of being at one and the same time both in the game, and in the dugout, watching. Introspective guy like Gus, must happen to him all the time.

And then he'd had the _other_ dream, the first time for a while… in that weird dream-China – Agatea? - with a fight in the street between two lots of heavily armed shitheads. Ordinary people screaming and trying to escape the flashing blades. And, in a growing sense of panic, fear and menace, seeing a woman the dream identified as his wife, and mother of his two daughters, stabbed and half-gutted by a katana longsword. She had screamed once and fallen. He, Twoflower, had screamed on watching her fall. And then vowed revenge on Lord Hong.

_**The High Energy Magic Building**_

"Everything comfortable, ambassador?" Stibbons enquired, courteously.

Twoflower, dressed in one of the going-anywhere suits used to access Roundworld, beamed. Next to him, Rincewind shuffled nervously. Across the floor of the building, the various guests and civic dignitaries had been seated with refreshments available, to watch the process.

"Remember, you are as near to completely safe as we can make you. HEX will monitor your progress, and whatever is going on around you – sunshine, rain, sensations of heat, cold, dryness, wetness - you will feel as analogues of the real thing. If anything potentially life-threatening happens around you, do not panic as you are safe from it. HEX can bring you back here in an instant. In a very real sense, you will not even have left here. Only your consciousness passes into Roundworld."

Lord Vetinari, a guest of honour, frowned.

"Professor Stibbons, this is absolutely safe? I would not care to be the man to have to tell the Emperor… (_he was cut off by a reverent chant from the Agatean delegation, of "Long may his armpits be steeped in fragrant oils")_ "…ha… indeed… I would not care to be the man to have to tell him that I mislaid his Ambassador in a scientific experiment that went wrong. I mean, it's not as if I can ring an agency and order another one."

"My Lord, I would not make the assumption that it's one hundred per cent safe" Stibbons replied. "There is a margin of error in any calculation and there's always the unknown quantity that you can never fully guard against or anticipate. In my experience when you label a thing or a process one hundred per cent safe, you're courting trouble. But I would estimate the safety level of this procedure as being in the high nineties".

Vetinari nodded. "I'm very glad you said that. Had you blithely asserted one hundred per cent safety, I would have considered that as tantamount to invoking the million-to-one chance against, and I would have refused to let you proceed. But the odds are acceptable. In your own time, Professor!"

"Welcome, one or two percent failure rate…" Rincewind muttered as he closed his visor.

Stibbons addressed the gathering.

"We are testing the proof of an exciting hypothesis which strongly suggests, taken to its logical conclusion, that everybody currently alive on the Disc has an exact duplicate, or doppelganger, living among the human population of Roundworld. We have proven the proposition in the case of Professor Rincewind and have conclusively identified his double. We could prove the case empirically by taking a random selection of people and setting HEX to identifiying possible candidates for their doubles, but this would involve scanning millions of people, and an unacceptable drain on University resources. We have good grounds for believing the Agatean ambassador has a doppelganger on Roundworld, and he has very kindly consented to assist us in the search."

Stibbons paused, and briefly reiterated the steps in the reasoning that had led them to discover the Doppelganger theory.

"HEX, please?"

++DOCTOR AVGUST STRINDBERG RIJNSWAND++ BORN DECEMBER 21ST 1936, ACCORDING TO THE CONSENSUS CALENDAR OF ROUNDWORLD, IN JONSKIPPANSKAN, IN THE KINGDOM OF SWEDEN++ HE IS TO BE BORN AT 11:30 AM++I WILL INSERT RINCEWIND INTO ROUNDWORLD AT THESE CO-ORDINATES AT 10:30 AM ++ CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME APPLIES++

The disembodied voice of HEX rang around the building. The audience sat, enthralled. Rincewind, hanging in his go-anywhere suit, shimmered, convulsed slightly, then went grey and still.

++PROFESSOR RINCEWIND HAS NOW BEEN TRANSLATED TO SWEDEN, AN HOUR BEFORE HIS DOPPELGANGER ENTERS THE WORLD++

The Omniscope display showed the whole blobby map of Roundworld for an instant, then narrowed down to a peninsular in the north of the Europeans continent, then to the rough middle of the central landmass.

"Stibbons, that's damn near the North Pole thing, isn't it? And it's winter?"

"Yes, sir. The air temperature in north-eastern Sweden is approximately forty degrees below the freezing point of water"

The Omniscope narrowed further down, to a white landscape streaked with unidentifiable black.

It then narrowed down to reveal the huddled figure of Rincewind, a Wizzard-red dot against the monochrome.

"Can you hear me, Rincewind?"

"Yes. It's bloody cold!"

"OK, we'll move you nearer to the town. You're out in the iron-mining district here."

"That's an iron-mine? It goes on for bloody _miles_!" said Lars Stronginthearm. "Can I take a look?"

"Don't mind me, I'm sure" grumbled Rincewind.

The Dwarf dignitaries were excitedly chattering among themselves concerning all the spill and slag on the landscape, look, isn't it beautiful, they must make millions of tons of iron here, what do they do with it? Our people on Roundworld must really be advanced!

++IN FACT, GENTLEMEN, THERE ARE NO DWARVES ON ROUNDWORLD++

"No dwarves?"

++NONE++ ALTHOUGH THE SWEDES, LIKE ALL SCANDINAVIAN HUMANS, HAVE FOLK-LEGENDS THAT ONCE THERE WERE DWARFS, WHO TAUGHT THEM THE SECRET OF METALWORKING++ THESE MINEWORKINGS ARE ALL DOWN TO HUMANS++

"Er… can I remind you about the cold?"

"Ok. Time for a tour of the mining industry later, gentlemen? Time is pressing. I' m going to move Rincewind _here_…"

Rincewind suddenly materialized inside a well-kept clean and tidy bedroom. The dominant motif was pinewood. He heard the obvious agonies of a woman in labour, who was being tended to by a well-scrubbed beefy blonde midwife.

"What we expect to see" Stibbons told the viewers "is that at the exact moment of birth, Rincewind will very suddenly disappear from this scene and rematerialize here. This is because the baby being born is the Roundworld doppelganger of Rincewind, and Roundworld will reject the one who does not belong to the same psychic space… it will then, except in exceptional circumstances, block Rincewind's entry into Roundworld for as long as the Doppelganger lives. Ah… here it comes now…"

The midwife held up the infant for its mother's inspection. Just for a fraction of a second, Rincewind looked at the infant Rijnswand. Then a very large elastic band snapped and propelled him at great force…

…back into the High Energy Magic building.

"We will now translate the Ambassador into Roundworld. In his case the parameters are slightly different. HEX?"

++DOCTOR JACK ZWEIBLUMEN++ BORN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, IN THE NORTH AMERICAN CONTINENT, ON THE 14TH APRIL 1946++ HIS SWISS-BORN FATHER IS IN THE USA AS A GUEST ACADEMIC++ HIS MOTHER IS A REFUGEE FROM HONG KONG++ HE IS TO BE BORN AT 3:30 PM EASTERN STANDARD TIME++ I WILL TRANSLATE THE AMBASSADOR TO THE SCENE AT 3:00PM++

Twoflower later recollected a moment of dizzying disorientation – what wizards called "_thlabber_" – as one reality cut out and another one cut in.

"Tell me what you see, Mr Ambassador"

"I'm on a street. There are quite a few people. Good heavens, what's making those vehicles go? No horses, but they move! There are shops and stores. "Grandberg's Kosher Delicatessen"

Twoflower moves along Twelfth Avenue as if an a daydream, buffeted by cursing pedestrians and attracting the suspicious attention of a traffic cop who observes him inspecting a WALK-DON'T WALK sign with perplexity.

_How does the sign KNOW when people are walking and when they choose to wait at the edge of the street?_ he wonders. _It's in perfect synchronism with the movements of the groups of people seeking to cross the street. _

As the cop turns to him and shouts "Hey, Mac! You there, Mr Magoo!", HEX moves him on. Twoflower rematerializes inside a room, with a scrum of people jostling around a bed and making noise. They are mainly women, although an older male is at the bedside tending to the patient. Twoflower is anonymous: one among many.

He hears a female voice chanting in a language he recognizes.

_Name of the great… fat smiling man with crossed legs? _ _The Great Butter? The Great …. Buddha._

++The Buddha is a God of this world. ++ The woman about to give birth was originally Buddhist ++ She is now Jewish++

Hex's voice appears in his head, soft and muted. _. _

_Namu Amida Butsu…Namu Amida Butsu….Namu Amida Butsu…. _The woman on the bed carries on chanting in between and over her contractions, attempting to project herself into another place while her body does what it must.

"Not long now" says a voice. "Ah… here it comes…"

There is a baby's cry. For a fraction of a second Twoflower looks on the child who will become Jack Zweiblumen. Then the _thlabber _sets in and his body is stretched back to the High Energy Magic Building.

"What we are about to do now" Ponder Stibbons explained, "is to test the hypothesis that says our experimental subjects may not re-enter Roundworld whilst their duplicates are living. HEX will shortly attempt to send our subjects back into Roundworld. He will alter the apparent passage of time so that, from Roundworld's point of view, one attempt is being made every hour for as long as it takes. If we are correct, they should not be able to re-enter the Project until their duplicates physically die. In the case of Rincewind, that will be 1987; for Mr Twoflower, that will be 2007. We will begin in December 1936 with Rincewind. Hex, you will include Mr Twoflower from April 1946 onwards. Go!"

The two test subjects felt a gentle low pulsing, made up of lots of individual attempts, made several thousand times every second, to send them into the Roundworld, followed by an equally insistent return to sender. From outside, it looked as if Rincewind and Twoflower were glowing in a range of Doppler-shifted colours.

The Omniscope counted down the days and months, like that bit in an old Hollywood movie where to denote passing time, a clock really speeds up.

++ JANUARY 1955 ++

++ FEBRUARY 1955 ++

++MARCH 1955 ++

Rincewind actually found the gentle vibration to be quite soothing. He wondered when the bad bit would start happening.

++ JANUARY 1966 ++

++ FEBRUARY 1966 ++

++MARCH 1966 ++

He allowed the purring gentle vibration to relax him.

++ AUGUST 1979 ++

++ SEPTEMBER 1979 ++

++ OCTO+++++++++++++

++ALERT++ALERT++

++TWOFLOWER AND RINCEWIND HAVE ENTERED THE PROJECT ++

"That wasn't meant to happen!" Stibbons exclaimed. "Not this soon!"

He looked frantically to where the two explorers hung inert in their harnesses, showing all the signs of having passed to Roundworld successfully.

"HEX!" barked Ridcully. "Can you locate 'em? Where are they?"

++SEEKING THAUMIC SIGNATURES++

"Is something wrong?" the Patrician asked, with mild interest.

"Nothing we can't put right, my lord…" Stibbons assured him, then broke off.

For something was beginning to happen to Roundworld. Something catastrophic.

"HEX! FIND THEM! BRING THEM BACK! NOW!" yelled Stibbons, as the massive cloud of black smoke and ash spread into the sky from its epicentre in the broken and shattered north-eastern part of the North American continent, mercifully obscuring the view of the ground below.

++I HAVE THEM ++ THEY WERE IN PENNSYLVANIA ++. LONDONDERRY COUNTY ++. THE SASQUADITCH RIVER++. THREE M ILE ISLAND."++

At the same time, the figures in the harnesses stirred. They looked up at the Omniscope, showing a Roundworld whose atmosphere was increasingly dark with volcanic soot and ash. The darkness was riven with lightning, and they were glad of this.

"HEX! FREEZE PROGRAM!" ordered Ponder. The picture on the omniscope froze and was replaced with a screensaver light show.

"Are we going to get into trouble for this, Rincewind?" Twoflower enquired.

Rincewind went "Gnnnnnn….."

++ I HAVE RESEARCHED++ THREE MILE ISLAND, PENSYLVANIA++ IN OCTOBER 1979, THERE WAS A NEAR-DISASTER THERE DUE TO THE FAULTY DESIGN ASSUMPTIONS OF ITS MAGNOX REACTORS++

++THE NEW CLEAR POWER PROVED TOO POWERFUL FOR ITS CONTAINING VESSELS ++ HEX translated.

++THIS CAUSED A SERIES OF PROBLEMS FOR THE MEN CHARGED WITH TENDING FOR THE POWER-PRODUCING REACTOR ++ ALMOST AS SOON AS THEY THOUGHT THEY HAD FIXED ONE PROBLEM, ANOTHER HAPPENED, THEN ANOTHER++ AND HERE WE HAVE SEEN THEIR BEING OVERWHELMED UNTIL THE WORST CASE SCENARIO HAPPENED++

"Stop pausin' for dramatic effect, man, get on with it!" Ridcully bellowed.

++ MELTDOWN++

++THE FISSILE MATERIAL IN THE NEW CLEAR REACTOR GENEERATES GREAT HEAT++ THIS IS WHY HUMANS THOUGHT IT WAS THE ANSWER TO THEIR ENERGY PROBLEMS++ BUT THAT WHICH GENERATES GREAT HEAT REQUIRES GREAT COOLING++ THE NEW CLEAR POWER STATION AT THREE MILE ISLAND WAS BUILT ON AN ISLAND IN A FAST-RUNNING RIVER SO THAT ITS WATERS COULD BE DIVERTED TO COOL THE REACTOR ++. BUT THE CUMULATIVE ERRORS IN THE ENGINEERING MEANT THAT NO WATER WAS CIRCULATING IN THE REACTOR TO COOL IT FOR QUITE SOME CONSIDERABLE TIME ++

The room was hushed. Stibbons heard himself asking

"And then?"

THE EXPLOSION WHEN THE REACTOR BROKE DOWN PUT SEVERAL MILLION TONS OF TOXIC GAS INTO THE ATMOSPHERE++ IN THE TRUE HISTORY OF ROUNDWORLD, IT ENDED THERE AS THE TECHNICAL STAFF WERE ABLE TO REVERSE THE BREAKDOWN AND RESTORE NORMALITY++ IN THIS REALITY, IT WAS ALLOWED TO RAGE ON, THE FISSILE MATERIAL GATHERED STILL MORE HEAT, AND MELTDOWN OCCURRED++ THIS IS WHERE THE REACTOR CORE GATHERS SO MUCH HEAT THAT IT MELTS THROUGH THE THIN CRUST OF SOLID ROCK WHICH LIES OVER THE MOLTEN MASS OF THE PLANET'S CORE++ ONCE IT HAD BURNT A WAY THROUGH, THE MOLTEN ROCK WHICH IS NORMALLY CONTAINED BY THE PLANET'S CRUST ERUPTED OUT THROUGH THE SHAFT++

"A bloody enormous volcano, eruptin' out of nowhere, and coming as somethin' of a surprise" mused Ridcully.

++MORE THAN A VOLCANO, ARCGCHANCELLOR++

++ A MANTLE PLUME++ A SUPER-VOLCANO++

++ONE THAT DESTROYS THE CONTINENT IT BEGINS ON, AND SPEWS OUT SO MUCH LAVA AND ASH THAT IT RESHAPES THE WORLD AND BLOCKS OUT ALL LIGHT TO THE PLANET'S SURFACE FOR MANY YEARS TO COME++ AND SO NEAR TO THE LARGE NORTHERN SEA, THIS ERUPTION DESTABILISES THE OCEAN++

"Sinks a lot of ships, does it?" Ridcully managed.

WORSE++ MASSIVE TIDAL WAVES HIT THE COASTS OF EUROPE, AFRICA, SOUTH AMERICA WITH MASSIVE LOSS OF LIFE++ THE BREAKING OF THE EARTH'S CRUST IN NORTH AMERICA RINGS LIKE A BELL AND DIRECTLY CAUSES CRUST FAILURE ELSEWHERE, NOTABLY IN THE PACIFIC RING OF ACTIVE VOLCANOES++ MANY SECONDARY ERUPTIONS OCCUR BETWEEN TWELVE AND FORTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER THREE MILE ISLAND BECOMES THE WORLD'S FIRST MAN-MADE VOLCANO++ BUT WITH SO MUCH ASH IN THE SKY BLOCKING OUT THE SUN, TEMPERATURES DROP++ WE HAVE SEEN THIS BEFORE++ SNOWBALL++ EXTINCTION OF THE HUMAN RACE++

"Well… we'd better do something about it , then" Ridcully managed.

++IN THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE ROUNDWORLD PROJECT, THE ONE WE ARE ANXIOUS TO PRESERVE, THE SITUATION AT THREE MILE ISLAND IS A POTENTIAL DISASTER ONLY, WHICH IS AVERTED BY THOSE SKILLED IN NEW CLEAR TECHNOLOGY++ THUS HUMANITY EVOLVES TO THE POINT WHERE IT CAN LEAVE THE PLANET IN THE NEXT CENTURY++ IN THIS REALITY, IT BECOMES A DISASTER THAT CAUSES THE EXTINCTION OF THE HUMAN RACE ONLY AFTER RINCEWIND HAS BEEN IN THE AREA++ THEREFORE RINCEWIND IS ALSO THE SOLUTION++

All eyes turned to Rincewind.

"OK, OK!" he said, crossly. "This is what happened in there…"


	12. Malignity

_**(Attention: this chapter steps across the line into outright crossover fiction with a non-Discworld book co-authored by Terry Pratchett)**_

Lulled into a false sense of security by their temporary exclusion from Roundworld, watching the countdown of the years of the Roundworld calendar and expecting it to go on into the next century, Rincewind and Twoflower had been taken off-guard by being abruptly dragged back into the project in 1979.

They had arrived in a nightmarish place made up of smooth beige-grey stone and lots and lots of pipework and tubes of varying sizes and colours. Ridcully remembered his experience in the parasitic shopping mall some years before and suppressed a shudder. It all sounded nastily familiar.

They had had barely an instant to recognize the two men, dressed in outlandish clothes, who were kneeling at a section of pipework and some sort of pump, having an animated conversation over a "coolant breach" and "if we jury-rig a solution, will it hold?" A large puddle of liquid was seeping into the _concrete_ below them, so the leak had evidently been going on for some time.

The four men had barely an instant to register horror as each looked directly into his own eyes… and after the awful recognition, there was a moment of fusion.

And in that instant of meeting, there was no longer the brilliant Swedish-born, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston-based nuclear engineer, Avgust Rijnswind, who in one parallel reality _did_ get Three Mile Island's nuclear power plant back online with minimal damage.

For just long enough, the man making the decisions was a terrified Wizzard from a different dimension, one where magic took the place of science, who knew nothing of what advanced thinkers on his world called _new clear power, _and still less about the myriad and exceedingly complex engineering systems needed to contain it.

Holding two ends of broken plastic pipe from which water – he hoped it was water – was gushing, and catching a fleeting glimpse of Rijnswind's train of thought as it disappeared down a distant tunnel.

"Link black tube to white connector." he thought, and "here goes nothing!"

The two pipes slotted together with a sigh and the coolant link was stopped. Rincewind wondered what the other two pipe-ends were for and reasoned that they must have a purpose, or they wouldn't be disconnected. Conscientiously, he screwed them back in together.

Unfortunately, Rijnswand's last thought before being taken over by Rincewind had been "DO NOT link black tube to white connector". The first two words of the train of thought had disappeared round a bend in the track before Rincewind looked that way. What the Wizzard has done, with the best of intentions, is to cross-link two systems that should never have been connected. This will prove to be the equivalent of the external conduit leading to a fatal weak-spot which is the downfall of Darth Vader's death star, or the large red button on the Evil Genius's console marked "Do Not Press"

Rincewind has in fact just managed to bypass and seriously restrict water flow into Reactor Two. The reactor will now be operating without coolant and has just become a ticking bomb with five or six hours to go before the thing happens which is the dread of all nuclear engineers.

_**China Syndrome.**_

_**Meltdown.**_

But here, the gestalt entities of Rincewind/Rijnswand and Twoflower/Zweiblumen have only an instant to contemplate a job seemingly well done, as horns and klaxons begin sounding and red lights flashing to indicate an emergency somewhere else.

Rijnswand shakes himself back into control and out of autopilot. His greatest fear is coming true: that long-anticipated and dreaded cascade of faults in Magnox. Resolve one, and three or four more happen.

He and Zweiblumen run to the control room without checking the reconnection job they have done on the flow initation device to coolant system three. By default, Twoflower and Rincewind accompany them.

They run into a large cavernous hall lined with banks of monitor screens, computers the size of living rooms, lights, flow process charts with flashing lights, and all manner of electronics. This is high-tech for the late 1970's: thirty years later the same amount of processing power will fit into a box eighteen inches by twelve, and almost every home will eventually have one.

There is an air of suppressed panic among the technicians manning, and in several cases womaning, the control room. Rincewind feels quite at home here. He is fighting against the extinction of his psyche and the complete loss of his individuality, absorbed into Rijnswand's as it was last time. Healthy fear and panic is maintaining his integrity. How had that old Ramtops witch explained it to him?

_It's like Borrowing… most witches can Borrow, right, which is to say, you ride as a passenger in something else's mind. My friend Esme is champion at that! But you have to be sure. It's the shape that dictates the mind. Stay for too long in a goose and you're not a witch any more. You're a goose that sometimes has an odd thought or a dream about being a human. Of course, I'm telling you this because you're a different kind of Wizard. Most of you buggers would just stomp into something's mind and demand to know were the driving seat is._

Stay in Rijnswind's mind for too long, here in his dimension, and I become absorbed. But then he has odd dreams sometimes about being a wizard on the Disc, and wonders…

Rincewind looked around the control room. There was something else here, something he couldn't quantify…..

In a place as near to Roundworld yet simultaneously as far away as the back of a shadow, HEX sounds an alarm and writes

++ MALIGNITY DETECTED++ REPEAT++ MALIGNITY DETECTED++

The massed civic dignitaries leaned forward in their seats, silent and breathless. They are mainly Ankh-Morporkians and have the civic instinct towards appreciation of street theatre, especially if it involves the humbling of the pompous and over-confident. Watching the wizards' finely-crafted show coming off its wheels and Ridcully silently fuming, like the Discworld equivalent of a mantle plume, amuses many.

Lord Downey popped another mint into his mouth and sat languidly back in his chair. This was more than street theatre of the highest order. It was drama. Watching the Wizards inadvertently assassinate a whole planet and four billion people on it appealed to his professional instinct. In fact, one day, might the Guild, in some unguessable future, be contracted to do similar? It was worth taking notes: the wizards had assured them that space travel would be feasible to human intelligence, and in fact the whole goal of the Project was in fact to see that the human population escaped into space before a cataclysm of some sort rendered the planet uninhabitable. And civilization, however unmeasurably technologically advanced, would always need Assassins. Downey had a brief mental vision of himself, looking out across a field of stars from inside a spacecraft. He was dressed all in black, as was fitting, but with a close-fitting metal helmet with a face cover and some sort of air-vent, through which his breath audibly exhaled . The helmet had a broad brim extending over his neck and both shoulders. At his waist was a… _light-sabre_? Downey looked out over the starfield at the planet the Guild had been contracted to inhume… he shook himself back to the present, wondering if he'd just been given a glimpse of the far future of the Guild. It was an oddly comforting one.

Downey resolved to find a young Assassin with the same kind of mental quirk as Teatime, who might be motivated to look into such theoretical issues and report on them – although goodness knows, right now it was science, but so far advanced of what we have it might just as well be fiction. Maybe young Clark, a technically and mechanically minded young Assassin of some promise, who'd reasoned back from Agatean "barking dogs" to a smaller, hand-held, version, asking "is there any reason why such firepower cannot be miniaturized?" No, Arthur Clark's fertile mind needed to be steered well away from the whole _gonne_ issue…

"Malignity." Ridcully hummphed. "Any more details as yet?"

++COMPUTING++

Meanwhile, Stibbons was earnestly reassuring the audience.

"There is no cause for concern or alarm, as we have been here at least three times before. On those occasions the Roundworld Project ran away with itself and ended up going down a blind alley towards apparent destruction. Once we learnt to manipulate time in the Project and could travel up and down its time line at will, we were able to halt the program, learn from our mistakes, then effectively rewind to the point of greatest danger and steer the Project along a safer course. At present time is halted completely, which allows us to think about the resolution of this problem, as well as offering us the ethical and moral course of inflicting no further damage to what are sentient intelligent people. HEX has just offered a clue as to how the catastrophe happened. If you will excuse me, I need to speak further to HEX and Rincewind. Light refreshments and drinks will be served. Thank you."

Stibbons joined Rincewind and Ridcully at HEX's console.

"Continue, Rincewind"

Rnicewind continued the story. He and Twoflower had been in the middle of the control room, where the majority reaction had been one of suppressed fear and panic which had helped him feel right at home. But he'd noticed that out of thirty or so people in white coats, something stood out about one of them.

"He was… sort of trying to stop himself laughing" Rincewind said. "And that's suspicious, when everyone else is attempting to pass a bowel motion made largely of bricks. Everyone else panicking and this one's enjoying himself? Suspicious."

Rincewind moved round behind the young-looking boy with the surprisingly white hair. No mistake. He really was holding his shoulders, as if fighting the urge to cackle. It was if he needed an Igor. Or two.

And then Rincewind, at a fundamental level, _knew._

Ignoring the surprise of Rijnswand, he threw their shared body forward in a furious lunge, catching the youth by the shoulder. Spinning him round, he was disorientated for a second by the impossibly old eyes in a smooth young face. Inhuman, inexpressibly cruel eyes. But the youth was equally surprised by having been caught – Rincewind surmised later it didn't happen often - and this allowed Rincewind to get a furious, angry, headbutt in, slamming right into the bridge of the nose. Blood flowed and the youth slumped forwards; Rincewind followed through with a rabbit punch to the back of the neck. In truth, the wizard wasn't a good fighter, but if rage or no alternative meant he had to fight, he relied on this first furious onslaught to carry it through.

He forced the youth down to the concrete floor, yelling "Sabotage! Get Security! " and tried to hold his arms behind his back. Behind him, he heard Zweiblumen's shocked gasp as he checked the system the boy had been working at.

"Godamn! He's right! You have got some _serious_ explaining to do, boy!"

Then things got weirder. The youth started to writhe in Rincewind's grasp, and his body started to become fuzzy and indistinct. His voice hissed

"Fool! Do you think you can defeat us? We are eternal! We are strong! Destruction is too far advanced!"

"We are three, yes. Heard it before. You're a bloody _Auditor_ in a human body, aren't you?"

The voice became even more tinny and inhuman, like prussic acid given a tongue.

"We are three for now, but the Fourth comes! Apocalypse is near! We ride! I, Pollution, join my brethren!"

And he abruptly disappeared. What might have been a silver crown, but tarnished to black, rolled out of the space where he had been. Sprawled on the floor, Rincewind had the sense to yell "Don't touch that! Treat it as…as…." and inspiration hit, "new clear waste. It's deadly poisonous!"

++ THE HORSEMEN RIDE ++ THEY ARE THE MALIGNITY ++

Ridcully and Stibbons looked at each other, appalled.

"What, Death and his chums? Tired of waitin' for the Apocalypse here, so they're practicin' on Roundworld to keep their hand in?"

++YES AND NO ++

"You're not helpin'.'" Ridcully said, his mounting temper only just held in check.

++ EVERYTHING HAS ITS DOPPELGANGER ++ INCLUDING RIDERS OF THE APOCALYPSE++

Ridculy harrumphed, indignantly.

"Of all the bloody blasted cheek! First, bloody elves! Then the sodding Auditors! And now it's the damnblasted Horsemen!"

Most of the civic dignitaries had resumed their seats by now, so as not to miss any developments, carrying drinks and paper plates of buffet food. Ridcully narrowed his eyes. Why was there a block of five empty seats, just _there_, when competition to be admitted to a prestige event had been intense? He looked again, using his wizard senses.

What he _saw_ made him go "Grrr!"

"I see it too, sir." Stibbons whispered.

"Be surprised if you didn't, lad. You might get some odd ideas, but at bottom you're a wizard."

He stepped forward, and addressed the audience.

"You are going to see me talking to what appears to be empty air. I have not lost me marbles. We just have extra guests here. Uninvited ones. _Anthropomorphic Personalities!"_

He addressed the seemingly empty chairs.

"It'd be a lot better if you buggers came out into plain view where everyone can see you."

DAMN. WE'VE BEEN RUMBLED. The voice was leaden, with a suspicion of sepulchre doors swinging shut.

_Will you stop hogging the blasted popcorn, Famine! _demanded a second voice. In tone and harmonic it sounded very much like Ridcully's.

Four figures slowly faded into view. Death, War, Famine and Pestilence.

"So you're in there for the death of _a_ world, then!" Ridcully accused.

YES AND NO. said Death. Under Ridcully's thermal stare, which was as good as a Rite of AsheKente, he continued.

LOOK, IT'S A QUIET TIME FOR ALL FOUR OF US. JUST ROUTINE BUSINESS FOR ME.

_You could take out Mossy Lawn, like I asked! _said Pestilence, in a thin wheezy voice. _If all doctors start to think like him about asepsis, I'm out of a job, like my oppo on this Roundworld thing! _

Rincewind, forcing himself to look, noted that Pestilence wore a thin silver crown that had tarnished to black. He also had a nosebleed.

"Hmmm" he thought.

"And the last two promisin' wars on the Disc both petered, out because of that same damn Vimes chap! One minute the promise of glorious bloody slaughter, the next, nothing! All I'm left with are border conflicts and domestic disputes!" complained War.

_Yes. I've met your wife. _Famine said, snidely._ And there hasn't been a decent Famine since the potato crop in Hergen last went belly-up._

SO WE THOUGHT, ALL OF US WITH SPARE TIME ON OUR HANDS, WE'D HAVE AN AFTERNOON OFF. COME AND WATCH A DISASTER MOVIE. IT'S BEEN MOST ENTERTAINING SO FAR!

Ridcully exploded. "You cheeky…."

Death looked abashed, if a seven-foot skeleton could ever be said to look abashed.

I APOLOGISE. PERHAPS IF WE CONSIDER THIS AN INFORMAL RITE OF ASHEKENTE, AND I UNDERTAKE TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS, IT MIGHT BUY US ALL ADMISSION?

Ridcully considered this.

"Done!" he said. "Now what's all this about even you four havin' duplicate selves on the Roundworld? We've looked and looked and we ain't found a trace of any Gods or supernatural entities!"

MAYBE YOU WERE SEARCHING IN THE WRONG PLACES AND THE WRONG WAYS. LET ME EXPLAIN. WHEN THE ROUNDWORLD PROJECT WAS BRIGHT AND SHINY AND NEW, THE DEAN PUT HIS HAND RIGHT INTO IT AND WIGGLED HIS FINGERS ABOUT A BIT JUST TO SEE WHAT HAPPENED, DID HE NOT?

Stibbons winced. Somebody in the audience giggled.

AND THUS HE SEEDED THE POTENTIAL WITH THE KINETIC. AS HE IS A HUMAN, THIS ALSO EXPLAINS WHY THERE ARE NO DWARFS NOR TROLLS ON ROUNDWORLD.

Death nodded at Lars Stronginthearm.

HAD THE DEAN BEEN A DWARF, THE HUMAN RACE WOULD IN FACT NOW BE A DWARF RACE. OR, WERE HE A TROLL, TROLLS WOULD DOMINATE.

HE SUCCEEDED IN IMPLANTING A LONG-TERM BIAS TOWARDS THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANITY. AND THUS WHEN THE HUMAN RACE EVOLVED INTO BEING, IT DEVELOPED CULTURAL CONCEPTS FROM THE SEEDS IMPLANTED BY THE DEAN. ONE OF THOSE WAS THE IDEA OF THE FOUR HORSEMEN. THEY DEVELOPED, INVISIBLY, IN TANDEM WITH HUMANITY.

"You should see MY oppo on Roundworld!" boomed War. "She's a proper little cracker, name of Carmine Zuiguiber! Have to admit I was a bit dubious of a woman War at first, but I'm dashed proud of the gel, some of the things she's achieved!"

INDEED. WHILE CANNOT PHYSICALLY ENTER ROUNDWORLD, I HAVE SPOKEN TO MY ROUNDWORLD SELF ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS WHEN WE LESSER DEATHS HAVE BEEN SUMMONED TO THE PRESENCE OF THE GREAT ATTRACTOR, AZRAEL. WE HAVE LEARNT FROM EACH OTHER.

_Mine bloody well retired. _Pestilence said, gloomily. _He said what with all this asepsis and cleanliness in hospitals and breakthroughs in medical theory, he was beat. He gave the Crown to the boy, Pollution._

"That's it!" shouted Rincewind. "That's the bastard who was sabotaging Three Mile Island! The one I nutted! That's what he called himself when he was resetting machines and fiddling with the knobs and controls!"

_And I get the nosebleed. Thank you very much, Rincewind! _

YOU WILL FIND THE WAR OF THE ROUNDWORLD IS BENEATH A MOUNTAIN IN NORTH DAKOTA AT THE MOMENT said Death. SHE IS WAITING FOR THE EXPLOSION THAT DESTROYS A LARGE PART OF THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA, SO THAT SHE CAN PERSUADE A RATHER NEUROVORIC AMERICAN ARMY GENERAL THAT THE SOVIET UNION HAS JUST LAUNCHED AN ATTACK ON THE NORTH AMERICAN CONTINENT WITH NEW CLEAR WEAPONS. THE AMERICAN COMMANDER WILL GIVE AN ORDER TO RETALIATE WITH EVERYTHING IN HIS ARMOURY. THE RUSSIANS IN TURN, PERCEIVING THEMSELVES ATTACKED, WILL LAUNCH A MASSIVE STRIKE.

ON TOP OF THE MANTLE PLUME, THIS IS THE END. EXTINCTION. FOR THE HUMANS OF ROUNDWORLD. NO DOUBT WHEN INTELLIGENT COCKROACHES ARISE, THEY WILL HAVE A LEGEND OF THE FOUR PRAYING-MANTIS RIDERS OF THE INSECT APOCALYPSE. AND SO IT GOES.

There was a stunned silence in the H.E.M.

Death nodded at Ridcully.

I HAVE CONFERRED WITH MY ASSOCIATES he said, AND ON THE WHOLE WE'D PREFER IT IF YOU STOPPED THEM. IF THE FOUR RIDERS OF ROUNDWORLD HAVE A FAULT, IT'S THEIR OVER-ENTHUSIASM. FOR ONE THING, THEY'RE DOING THEMSELVES OUT OF A JOB. IT'S ALWAYS ADVISABLE TO STILL HAVE A JOB TO DO TOMORROW.

"Damn right!" agreed War. "Catch me retrainin'! At my time of life! Huh!"

"Er.. a small thing, but you laid out five chairs?"

_Always the way, isn't it? _said Famine. _He faithfully promises to turn up, you keep a seat for him, and he lets you down. Sod._

_Where is he, anyway? wondered Pestilence. _

(The Fifth was, in fact, inside the reactor core at Three Mile Island, having got into Roundworld through devious routes of his own (he is not bound by laws nor convention. In fact, he is famous for _**not **_being Law). This is an environment he loves: the random chaos of an out-of-control nuclear pile is like a holiday to him. It is important to know that he is neither adding to nor taking away from the reactor's slide to ruin. It is enough just to get in there and _be_. Kaos laughs, and basks in the warmth.)

++ MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION ++

New images are cascading on the screen.

"the President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island" Ponder read, slowly. "The Kemeny Commission Report"

"Dated for six months after the date of the accident… oh, my!"

++ FROM THE ROUNDWORLD TIMELINE WHERE THIS INCIDENT IS JUST THAT, AN ACCIDENT++ WHERE RIJNSWAND SUCCEEDED IN CONTAINING A PARTIAL MELTDOWN++ IT ITEMISES THIRTEEN SEPARATE CRISIS POINTS WHICH REQUIRE RECTIFICATION TO PREVENT CATASTROPHE++

Ponder Stibbons stiffened with new resolve.

"Printout please, HEX! Sir, we can save this planet!"

The audience cheered and clapped.

Rincewind, Mr Twoflower, I want you!"

* * *

A deadly quiet, punctuated by occassional moaning, settled over the control room at Three Mile Island. The big explosion, when it had come, had blasted the supposedly blast-proof doors off their mounting and propelled them across the room, killing or wounding many. It had been followed by in influx of air that Rijnswand and Zweiblumen knew was laden with deadly radiation.

Making himself as comfortable as he could in the hot dry smoky air, Rijnswand laid down and waited for the end, knowing he'd ingested enough radiation to kill him several times over. The apparently unscathed had done what they could for the more obviously wounded, but everyone knew there was no getting out. Behind him, a dying computer spluttered and fizzed. He held the picture of Connie in his hand and gazed at it as if it were a holy icon.

Zweiblumen watched his friend, feeling an aching regret that he'd never loved anyone that much, and it was too late to try.

"Gus. Buddy" he said, weakly. "Back there, did you have a feeling some other guy was looking out of your eyes?" _They can call me mad now. It don't matter. _

"You get it too? I've had it ever since that flight out of Miami five years ago"

"Me, too. I wish we'd talked about this before!"

"He's still me. But a me from some other place, some other reality. He was the guy who cottoned on to that…thing… with the weird eyes and made me jump him."

"You read a lot of sci-fi, Gus. That guy who was sabotaging the plant."

"Call him White" Gus said, firmly. It felt appropriate.

"He wasn't human, was he? The way he vibrated and his voice changed and he just dissappeared."

"I saw it too, And he wasn't. Human. My other self knew that. Maybe the space aliens wanted to blow this place. Our other selves are the cops trailing them. But they got here too late."

They talked some more throughout the last hours. Jack scrounged up some cokes from a machine that had escaped destruction.

"China syndrome" said Jack. "Jeez, my relatives are in for a hellova surprise."

"The old idea a reactor meltdown, if it were big enough and hot enough, could melt its way through the entire planet and come out on the other side?" Gus asked. "Won't work. There's a lot of molten rock down there under pressure. You melt a hole through the rock holding it in place, according to the geology boys, and it all comes spurting out as Mount Harrissburg, Pennsylvsania, the world's newest volcano."

"And you and me melted to slag in seconds."

"Rather that than radiation sickness over a few weeks."

Neither of them felt the mantle plume that rumbled up and swatted all life aside in a matter of seconds, obliterating and melting all trace of human tenancy in the eastern United States. Half the Russian missiles were wasted on cities that were already dead.

And when all the natural and man-made explosions were over, that was it. Snowball. The end.


	13. Pause, Rewind, Edit, Play

_**(The crossover with "Good Omens" continues)**_

**Pause, Rewind, Edit, Play**

Possibly the strangest Council of War gathered in the High Energy Magic building at Unseen University. Ridcully, Stibbons, Rincewind, Twoflower, the Librarian, the Patrician, and the Four Riders of the Apocalypse, with of the Guild of Artificers, Dr Downey, and Mr Sendivoge and Mr Silverfish of the Guild of Alchemists. The word has been sent out for Commander Vimes and Captain Carrot of the Watch to attend as quickly as they can manage. Vetinari, pzzlingly, has also requested two other individuals to attend on him. They will, possibly more literally than we can imagine, attend in their own time.

Meanwhile, the rest of the civic dignitaries have been ushered to a reception room elsewhere where free food and drink is on offer, with a promise that some of their number may be called in to advise as and when need arises.

Sendivoge and Silverfish are not in a happy mood. Now that the University has chosen to go public on the long-rumoured Roundworld project, they have chosen to launch a protest to Vetinari that the Wizards have wilfully broken the principle of demarcation, the ad-hoc agreement that prevents one Guild from poaching on occupational territory which rightly belongs to another. This is best expressed by the long-standing agreement between Thieves and Assassins, formulated by former Assassins' Guild president Zlorf Flannelfoot:

_You rob them. We kill them._

Although other guilds have since coined variations on this theme. Mrs Rosie Palm of the Seamstresses' Guild, and Miss Dixie "Va-Va" Boom of the rather newer Guild of Ecdysiasts, Nautchers, Cancanières, and Exponents of Exotic Dance, following a marathon twelve-hour negociation session as to where their respective interests laid, came up with:

"_We will rip their clothes. You can sew them up."_

Little arrangements like this prevent bloodshed in the streets.

But here, things briefly got heated.

"My Lord, this is intolerable! We stick to our side of the agreement scrupulously and we do not do magic!" Sendivoge fumed.

"They're doing SCIENCE, my lord!" Silverfish huffed, indignantly.

"And rather better than _you_, I have to say." Vetinari snapped, impatiently. He turned back to the plans of the nuclear reactor.

"And you say, Mr Pony, the uranium rods may be brought together to create a sub-critical pile, in which a reaction begins which generates heat, which is exchanged by turning running water to steam, which may then be forced to turn the wheels of a turbine, generating electricity. The steam is then diverted to a cooling tower, where an artificial cloud forms and it rains back to earth, rejoining the river from which it was extracted or diverted as clean safe drinking water as is needed. Meanwhile, the action of the coolant, together with manual intervention which pulls the rods further apart or pushes them together, keeps the core temperature of the reactor stable. Most ingenious!"

"I'd like to have a go at this, m'Lord!" said Mr Pony, hopefully.

"No doubt you would. No doubt." The Patrician turned back to

the Alchemists and fixed them with a cold stern eye. Silverfish broke the silence first.

"But that's _**Uselessium**_, my Lord!" he wailed. " It's never had a purpose before, and you have to cook up tons of ore to get even the smallest amount."

And that other explosive metal, the one Roundworld scientists call Plutonium?" Vetinari asked, raising an eyebrow.

"We've synthesised that one as well, my Lord. We call it Gaspodium. Because it's as useful as that scruffy dog that hangs around the kitchen door scrounging for handouts." (1)

"And exactly how much of both these metals have you accumulated to date?" Vetinari inquired.

"It keeps accumulating, my Lord. Because it's the only tangible success we've ever had in turning one metal into another, young Alchemists keep repeating it in the hope that one day they might get gold. So it's just stacking up in the cellars."

"We've got piles of the stuff, in fact. Masses." added Silverfish

"So much that space could get critical down there." Sendivoge explained. "So maybe if the city wanted to buy it… so Mr Pony could try out this new clear power idea we've got from Roundworld.. maybe we get a percentage of the ongoing revenues…" (2)

Vetinari stood motionless and stroked his jaw in thought. Finally he spoke.

"I've learnt a lot of fascinating things in the past half-hour or so." he said. "Things which could have a far-reaching and irreversible effect on the Disc, not just Ankh-Morpork. I am persuaded that this _new clear power_ represents an energy source which, when all runs according to plan and design, would meet all our energy needs and more for a long time to come. I am further convinced by My Pony and by Mr Silverfish and Mr Sendivoge that we have the technological ability to refine the key metals and build the reactor they power. I am further assured that for 99.9% of the time, this is in fact a safe, clean, cheap method of generating power. It could revolutionise our world. These are powerful arguments. Subtle, seductive, attractive arguments. I would be remiss in my duties if I did not seriously consider them."

Vetinari paused to let it sink in.

"However"

He span to face the Project.

"Today we have seen the other 0.1%. I have had a terrible glimpse at what happens when it goes wrong. _**Once is enough!**_

That reactor core melted through twelve miles of solid rock into the planet's core and directly facilitated the destruction of its entire world. Oh, I know malignity was at work, but I am assured the same malign influences exist around us in greater numbers." He nodded towards the Horsemen. "Present company possibly excepted, we still have the Auditors of Reality, the Elves, and the Dungeon Dimensions, which the wizards tell us, as they police those particular borders with their usual noteworthy efficiency, remain great and present threats. Can you imagine a situation where such a thing was allowed to melt its way into the Disc and out through the other side, with subsequent consternation to elephants and Turtle? "

"I am not giving them the opportunity!" Vetinari almost shouted. "I decree, here, in front of you as civic leaders: there will be NO MORE work done within my jurisdiction on new clear power. Lord Downey, you recall the circumstances in which you became guild president? These are exactly the same. All work is to end. There are no exceptions. All papers, documents, recordings and speculations….no, I leave you your speculations, this is a free society – are to be surrendered to the Palace and placed under the firmest lock and key. And, gentlemen of the Alchemist's Guild, did I hear you correctly? Did you really say you have a, ah, _critical mass_, of uranium and plutonium, accumulating in your _cellar_? Or Uselessium and Gaspodium, if you prefer. I know you like to blow up your Guildhouse at random intervals. I tolerate that. But making so sure of its destruction that you take the entire city with it? Are you insane? Have you not gathered a THING from the physics and science coming out of the project? If cities have their doppelgangers on Roundworld, I do not wish Ankh-Morpork's twin city to be Hiroshima or Nagasaki!"

He looked back to the project.

"Or Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.."

++OR CHERNOBYL ++

All eyes turned to HEX.

++ THE HUMANS OF THE SOVIET UNION REGION HAVE A SIMILAR ACCIDENT EIGHT YEARS LATER++ HAPPILY IT DOES NOT RESULT IN TOTAL DESTRUCTION AND DAMAGE IS LIMITED TO THE THOUSAND OR SO SQUARE MILES OF THE WESTERN UKRAINE++ THE HUMANS WILL RESOLVE THIS ONE THEMSELVES WITHOUT OUR INTERVENTION++

A calmer Vetinari faced down the Alchemists. "Take your stocks of Uselessium and Gaspodium. Encase them in cement inside lead drums. Then take it to sea and drop them in the Gorruna Trench. Collect documentation on safe disposal of new clear waste from the printouts HEX has gathered for us. Then GO! DO IT!"

It was said that Vetinari would tolerate anything except that which put the city in danger. Seeing his rarely expressed anger, the rest of the group didn't doubt it. The alchemists departed, immediately. As they left, heavy boots clattered into the room.

"You wanted us, sir?"

"Ah yes. Sir Samuel. Captain Carrot. Thank you for attending so promptly. There may be a couple of, ah, singular, arrests for you to bring about. I'll brief you later about supervising a certain job I have called for to be done at the Alchemists' Guild. But for now, we have a world to restore. Mr Stibbons, please quickly brief the Commander and the Captain on events so far? Gentlemen, ideas?"

War cleared his throat with a _harrumph_.

"Rincething brought down Pollution. So one of 'em's dealt with. But you'll have to do something about me counterpart on that world. Even if you reverse the explosions at this damn power plant, if I understand rightly, she's got her fingers on some of the deadliest firepower any general was ever entrusted with. She's good. She'll find some other way to use it! And those _new clear missiles_ ain't war, to my mind. They're too lethal. They're not sportin'! What's the use of winnin' a war if nobody's alive afterwards to know they've blasted well won, or been defeated? I'm on your side on this one, m'lord!"

"Thank you." Vetinari said, with sincerity. "Ah, my other guests are here. Mr Stibbons, can you…"

"No need" Lu-Tze the Sweeper said, cheerfully. "When we picked up on what's been going on, we hopped back a few days in time to understand what you've been up to. We've been here all along, me and Marco!"

"Right!" agreed the larger and hairier of the two History Monks.

"oh… by the way, you win. You reverse the damage to the Roundworld, and you neutralise the other Riders. We're just not allowed to tell you _how_. Causality, see."

Lu-Tze patted HEX's console. "Bloody clever machine, this. I'd never of thought of manipulating Time with a machine. We could use something like this back at the monastery! "

++ THANK YOU ++

++ HERE IS MY PLAN++ IT REQUIRES THE CO-OPERATION OF DEATH ++

Pages rustled into a hopper.

Stibbons, his briefing finished, speed-read the document.

"Rincewind accompanied by Twoflower will first…

"Stibbons, accompanied by Rincewind and Twoflower, will then return to Three Mile Island…

"Commander Vimes and Captain Carrot, accompanied and guarded by the history monks, will make the following arrest…

"The prisoner is to be taken to a neutral zone for interrogation, which will be provided by the Death of the Discworld… the WAR of the Discworld will be in attendance…

"Then Roundworld will flow true again…"

Stibbons, fired by a new purpose, whooped with relief.

"Sir, we can make this WORK!"

"Carry on, Mr Stibbons!" boomed Ridcully. "Better let 'em in again so they don't go away thinkin' wizards are a bunch of incompetent fumble-fingered headless chickens! Let 'em see us getting' it RIGHT!"

As the civic dignitaries returned to their seats, the final acts began…

* * *

1 The planet Pluto was named after Walt Disney's cartoon dog, not the Greek God. Therefore when the element_** Plutonium**_ came along…

2 Silverfish and Sendivoge had learnt from past association with CMOT Dibbler, during the Moving Pictures fiasco . Especially about copyright law and percentages of the gross.


	14. Chapter 14

Dopplegangers 15 –

_**Resolution, part one**_

Everything was in place for the final working-out of the drama. Twoflower and Rincewind, suited up, waited while Vimes, Carrot and the two History Monks were suited up for their mission.

"This has got to be the strangest arrest I've ever been sent on." Vimes mused

"You're looking forward to it, sir. I can see it in your face." Carrot observed.

"Nicking an anthropological personification for murdering an entire planet. That's breach of the peace on the grand scale!"

"It's what we're about, old boy." War said, cheerfully. "It's what we're made for! It's just that she's pushin' it too far. No sense of proportion and no idea where to stop."

"Just as well she doesn't belong to the Assassins' Guild, or we'd never have been able to touch her!"

"She just needs a talkin' to. See you at Death's place!"

"Places, everyone!" called Stibbons. "You know your briefings. Rincewind, Twoflower, I'll catch up with you at Three Mile Island. And… good luck!"

Rincewind and Twoflower materialised outside a high security fence

"Emergency Food Storage Centre" read Rincewind. Warning: Armed Response!"

"Better not hang around, then. Got the weapons? Good!" Like two commandos armed for war, they moved off. They'd been briefed on the target, who was touring the warehouses, the world seemingly oblivious of him as he planted seeds of mould, decay, inedibility, in the stored produce. A security patrol passed by Rincewind and Twoflower, oblivious of their presence because HEX was shielding them. The patrol also passed by the target, who seemingly had his own shielding.

HEX put them on either side of him.

"Doctor Sable?" Rincewind inquired. The target, a tall, thin, man with impeccably cut dark hair and a goatee beard, paused for just long enough.

_He's the spitting image of Vetinari, _thought Rincewind, as he lifted and struck with his weapon, simultaneously grabbing the back of Sable's head so as to grind his face remorselessly into the thick creamy icing of the chocolate cake.

Sable half-choked, half-screamed, convulsing as the high-calorie foodstuffs were forced into his mouth. Rincewind dropped the paper plate and wrenched an arm up behind Sable's back, allowing Twoflower time to slap a half-pound pack of butter, pure condensed fat calories, into the screaming mouth. The chocolate sauce was a courtesy detail.

_It's working! Like a hydrophobe with water! HEX said it would!_

For a second or two, Sable's body became a writhing, Dungeon Dimension- like Thing. Then his eyes, as non-human as White's, stared into Rincewind's with something approaching hate. Then his body popped and disappeared. A set of scales popped into existence where he had been.

"Don't touch them!" Rincewind screamed at the little man in the brown uniform who had appeared from the UPS van …_had that been there a second ago_?.... who picked up the scales with long tongs and put them in a box, carefully.

"Orders, sir. Now can you tell me the fastest way to Cheyenne Mountain? I've to pick up a sword from the military base there"

Rincewind noticed, without surprise, there was already a silver crown in the box, glowing clean and free from tarnish.

"Just come from Three Mile Island, have you?"

"Hard to get into, sir. Some sort of nuclear flap on. But they seem to have it under control. There's a chap there who looks just like you, by the way! But then they say we've all got a double somewhere, don't they?" He tipped his cap and got back into the van.

As he drove off, Rincewind and Twoflower, spattered in high-calorie grease, faded out and reappeared in the HEM, to cheers and applause. Sergeant Jack Clapstick, the Clowns' Guild representative, actually led a standing ovation, shouting "Now that's what I call death by chocolate!"

They took a bow.

Mission accomplished.

"OK, we're off again! And this time I'm coming with you!"

Stibbons, suited up, called them over.

"You'll already be there, from last time. Try not to let yourself touch ANYTHING and persuade your doppelganger to listen to me. I'll do the talking."

"So this is where it gets difficult?"

"You've got it. Trust me. I know what I'm doing."

The HEM winked out of existence again. Rincewind landed in the dark. He thought he heard Rijnswand's voice echoing and fading…_ link white tube to black connector…. _And felt his hands reaching to connect the tubes.

_No!!! _he shouted. He felt himself leap in fear.

_Just how many of me are in here!_

_Two of us, at the moment. I've been sent back. Because you did such a crap job last time._

_No kidding?_

_You destroyed the bloody planet!_

_Oh… somebody deliberately disconnected this pipe, didn't he?_

_Yes. Here he comes now…_

White turned the corner, humming a tune. Rincewind leapt from standing start to deliver a punch that rattled White's head off the concrete of the wall. He heard a distant Rijnswind shout in alarm. But he hit White again and again, shouting "You bastard! You killed a planet! You little SHIT!" This time, Rincewind was angry.

The denouement was much as before. White boasted about going back to rejoin the Three, so they could invoke the Fourth with "Come and See!" then briefly looked like a refugee from the Dungeon Dimensions before popping out of existence. A crown, that might once have been silver, rolled from the space where White had been.

"_Don't touch it!" _yelled Rincewind. The little man from the UPS van appeared, and picked up the crown with a set of tongs.

"Thought I'd lost this" he said, to nobody in particular. "they'd have my _guts_ if I lost this. Oh, hello sir, didn't see you there! I say, did you know there's a chap looks just like you, works at the emergency food storage depot downstate? Funny old world, isn't it?"

He tipped his hat, and left.

_Would somebody please like to tell me what's going on? _

It was a very annoyed Dr Rijnswand.

"That goes for this particular New Yorker too, buddy!" sad another voice.

"Er… Dr Rijnswand? Dr Zweiblumen? Please stop what you're doing and listen to me. I'm afraid we don't have much time."

Ponder Stibbons.

"You're telling me!" said Rijnswand. "We were called in here later than the last possible moment to resolve an emergency here. Who are you and what can you offer that can help us? And do you know anything about these voices in my head?"

"I can offer you this, doctor" Stibbons held out a copy of the Kemmeny Report into the failure of the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island.

"It lists thirteen separate faults which all needed checking and rectifying. If you're in any doubt at all, check the publication date"

"Shit" whistled Zweiblumen. "This one's the primary input valve. Right here. There's a warning light, or should be, over _here_, that'll tell us whether we've successfully reconnected."

Zweiblumen looked over. A broad smile crossed his face.

"I don't give a shit if you guys are spacemen, or mind-travelling aliens, or humans from the future. Because you just saved our asses!"

"Hold that thought, Doc. I'm Ponder Stibbons. University professor myself, but in no science you'll probably recognise. That thing in the corridor my colleague Professor Rincewind presumably killed – he was sabotaging your plant. If he hadn't been stopped here, he'd have rest a lot of your computers to do exactly the wrong thing. However hard you worked, you'd have had two more mistakes springing up for every one you resolved. You'd have ended up in meltdown. "

Ponder paused.

"We have the best interests of your planet at heart, Doctors. You can perhaps call us….guardians. The human race has a very special destiny to fulfil and it's our job to help you get there."

Rijnswand shook his head. "Professor Rincewind, if you can hear me. when all this is over, there's nothing better I'd like than a long chat with you. I think you could answer a lot of questions. But for now, you're a useless passenger in my head and I need to think clearly, so if you don't mind?"

"HEX, please return Rincewind and Twoflower to the HEM" Ponder requested.

"Thirteen problems, you say, Professor?"

"Thirteen, doctor. They're all listed. By the way, the report belongs in a different time and place. When your need for it is over, it will return there. It'll spare the complexity of your having to explain why you have a document which isn't due to be printed for another six months yet".

Ponder shook hands with Rijnswand and Zweiblumen.

"Aren't you going to wish us good luck?"

"Oh, you don't need it" Ponder assured them. "Really. History says Three Mile Island survived with relatively minor damage, although Reactor Two was a write-off."

And

"One to return, HEX"

Ponder shimmered and vanished.

Rijnswand and Zweiblumen looked at each other.

"Must be the mothership, this HEX". Jack mused.

And they got to work, and rescued a power plant.


	15. The strangest arrest ever made

_**The Arrest**_

**US Northcom (formerly NORAD), Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. **

Base commander General Ronald J. Rust blinked confusedly at his guest. He had no clear idea as to how she'd got here, but he reasoned that if she's passed though seventeen progressively tighter levels of security to get into his office in the heart of the mountain complex, she was most probably legit.

Therefore the story she was telling him was in all probability true, although a line fault was preventing him from ringing out to check her credentials.

The red-haired colonel from Highest Security crossed her legs, making him lick his lips reflexively.

_She's one damn-fine looking woman, _he thought. Then he made himself pay attention to her words again as she indicated the map of North America that was being projected onto the wall-screen, with the cities and main strategic places marked.

"Watch Harrisburg, Pennsylvania" she said, with authority.

"We know the Commies are going to launch a single missile from a submarine currently off shore, we have no idea where, although all Naval assets are hunting. It will be a cruise missile, a sensitive intelligent computer-guided weapon that will fly low, at subsonic speeds that can be mistaken for a civil aircraft, an it will come in under the radar. Yes, General, the Russians really are ahead of us in cruise missile technology. They have now what our suppliers can only hope to deliver in six years."

She loved to tell generals inaccuracies like this: it made them press and push for bigger and faster toys regardless of cost. Only a couple of months before, she had been assuring a Red Army Marshal that the Germans' latest tank would be far better, in every respect, than anything the Russians could field. Why, they were even going to call it a Tiger, in honour of its predecessor that had given the Red Army such a headache in the Great Patriotic War. Appalled by the spectre of a resurgent Germany with the best tanks for a new _blitzkrieg_, the Marshal had then gone to demand improvements in the T-72 to match, preferably exceed, the wholly fictitious qualities she had assigned to the equally fictitious Tiger.

Noting the pallidity of the General's face, she went on:

"This cruise missile is primed to explode in the reactor of the civilian nuclear station at Three Mile Island. The Russians are hoping we will mistake it for an accident at the plant, so that our attention will be diverted there. Then they can send over more stealth weapons to confuse and demoralise us. You'll see I'm right within the half-hour. Then you must retaliate with everything you have!"

The General's mounting anger and indignation with the goddamn Commies is palpable. He has been an easy touch for a preposterous story. She has this effect on men.

_They believe what they want to believe_, thought Carmine. _Men were ever such fools. _

There was a commotion in the corridor outside.

A cursory knock at the door, then four uniformed and booted soldiers rushed in.

The leader, a cigar-smoking villain of a Colonel with a wicked scar across his face, nodded at her.

"Morning, sir, sorry you've been disturbed! "

"What the Hell!" began Rust. "Get the hell OUT of here, colonel, this is beyond top secret! The Reds are about to start WW3!"

"With a missile strike on, oh, Harrisburg Pennsylvania?" the colonel inquired. "Is that what she told you?"

He turned to her.

"Read her the charge sheet, Captain"

The huge red-haired captain cleared his throat.

"Miss Carmine Zuigiber, aka War, aka Red, aka Scarlet, age unknown but presumed to be at least seven thousand years, of no fixed abode, you are under arrest for several thousand counts of incitement to breach of the peace – we will accept World War One and Vietnam as sample counts and a court may allow the rest to stand on file – illegally trading in weapons of mass destruction, and genocide of the highest order, in that you are currently conspiring with individuals known as White and Black to destroy this planet. You are not obliged to say anything now but anything you do say may be taken down and used as evidence in court!"

She spat back at them: Rust expected her to deny such arrant nonsense, but she said nothing. The larger of the two Asian-looking MP's handcuffed her hands in front of her.

Rust felt vaguely disappointed his time of glory had been denied him. The cynical looking colonel caught his look. He read the nameplate on the desk.

"Rust, eh.. And a Ronnie to boot. Ah-ha, don't touch that!"

The colonel had seen Rust reaching for the alarm button. His punch was pulled, but hard enough to knock Rust back into his chair.

"Does this job give you any actual pleasure, Ronnie? On _your _say-so, enough explosive power can be unleashed from here to fry the _world. _By rights, I should be arresting you too, but there's always another Rust. There always bloody well is."

"I'm busting you, mister. Assault on a senior officer!" Rust spat out. "And let me tell you, I'm proud of my job! If one day, one day, I have to make that decision, it will be with noble pride in being an American and knowing I am in the front line against Soviet aggression. If I push that button, it will be with pride in America and pride in the best damn nuclear weapons in this world!"

Vimes, who'd been shown pictures of Roundworld after the mantle plume event, and who'd had Hiroshima carefully explained to him, felt his eyes narrowing.

"Even though the Russians will have this place targeted with their own weapons? Even though you and all you know and love will inevitably die?"

"It's the highest honor, the greatest privilege, to die for your country! But a rebrobate thug like you wouldn't know the meaning of honor!"

"You're right, Ronnie. But then I never claimed to be a gentleman. And now I know you bloody Rusts get EVERYWHERE!" He looked into the contemptuous ice-blue eyes of the general, and _knew_ the Doppelganger theory was spot-on.

This time, Vimes didn't pull the punch.

"Sir? We've got to get out! To the extraction point!" Carrot said, urgently.

Vimes nodded. Wondering briefly who his own doppelganger was on this planet, they locked the Colonel's office door and left, heading for the higher floor in the mountain base from which HEX could extract them.

Carmine, passive in the grip of the big Asian, grinned. It was starting to work. Men got angry around her. Made mistakes. Started fighting each other. Forgetting the woman who was provoking it all… she focused on the welling spring of anger in Colonel Vimes. Yes. There was something she could use…

To her perplexity, she felt every attempt to reach inside Vimes' mind was being blocked. Something was there…

… _and the Fifth who walked among them, the spirit the Dwarfs knew as the Guarding Dark, that which protected coppers and saved them from the Beast, recognised the Beast in one of its nastier forms, and deflected her malice…._

She focused on the red-haired captain and read only devotion to duty and a single-minded resolution to get the job done, a plodding, methodical sort of mind with occasional flashes of near-genius, happy and content in who he was and what he did and wishing to be nothing else…ah, a chink. Then a stab of fear, an emotion Carmine rarely felt:

_They are not of this world! No wonder I can't break in! But they're still human and Carrot has his worries…_

A soft voice in Carrot's head said _Were you never jealous of Gavin? When she left you for him?_

_-She left _with_ him for Überwald. There's a difference._

_Or her other lovers? She's had many. As woman and as wolf._

_I never claimed to own her. She's her own woman. And wolf. What she did before she met me is nothing to concern me._

_And you, virgin until you met her? Do you not hanker after other women, Carrot Ironfoundersson? Release these bonds. I could be good for you…_

She felt her essence flung out of his mind.

The smaller, scrawnier, older MP, the one who had so far said or done nothing, waggled a reproving finger at her.

_Ah. The Asians. _

She tried to get into their minds. She met with a contented serenity, and she knew. Her soul shrivelled at the edges.

_Wu-wei, _passive resistance, fighting your enemy with a loving heart. The one form of warfare the human race had evolved that she could make nothing of, save occasionally getting one of them to set fire to himself as a martyr. They were bloody god-and-satan-damned Buddhist monks! Adepts, even! And they were being used to absorb and neutralise her malice and rage! Somebody had thought this through!

She wept a bitter frustrated tear. Wait… the younger, larger monk. Some earthly concern he hasn't shed. A vanity.

Ripping both handcuffed arms up in a single move, she knocked his outsized helmet off. Hair cascaded. She gripped it and pulled, trying to wrench it out by the roots. Marco Soto roared with rage. This revitalised her….

And then there was a tug and time rewound. To just before she had the idea to go for the hair. The helmet was still on his head.

"We can keep this up all day, you know" the monk assured her, smiling. "OK, so in _that_ reality you touched the hair and I got mad. In this, I'm my normal cheerful self"

The War of the Roundworld surrendered.

They got to the extraction point without difficulty, such soldiers as they met keen to back away from an MP squad without making waves.

As he had been instructed, Vimes shouted

"HEX! Six..no, FIVE to extract!"

++I hear you. You will briefly go to another place. Do not be alarmed by what you see. You are guests, and perfectly safe.++

_SIX? _Wondered Vimes, in the limbo of passage. _Where did that come from? _

_I walk with you all the days of your life. _said the Guarding Dark._ Back there, you really needed me. And you knew it, too. _

They rematerialised in a gloomy room, bare except for a bookcase, a desk, and eight chairs. Somebody had been warned of their arrival: a tray stood there with a teapot, milk, sugar and enough cups for eight.

THANK YOU, ALBERT. YOU MAY LEAVE NOW.

Death and War stood, waiting for them.

SO THIS IS THE PERSON WHO CAUSED THE TROUBLE.

Death stepped forwards to investigate Carmine Zuigiber.

AN IMMORTAL SPIRIT, MAN-MADE. SHE WILL NOT DIE, AND EVEN THAT IS PROBLEMATICAL, WHEN THE ROUNDWORLD DIES. INTERESTING.

"Who are you? You're not the Death I know. Don't you mean Earth? What is this place?"

YOU ARE IN MY DOMAIN, FOR NOW. WE CANNOT ENTER ROUNDWORLD, EARTH AS YOU CALL IT. YOUR FOUR CANNOT ENTER OUR DISCWORLD. BUT WE CAN MEET YOU HERE, AS IT STANDS OUTSIDE. NEUTRAL TERITORY. AND BE THANKFUL I DO NOT INSIST YOU CALL ME "LORD", AS YOUR DEATH EXPECTS. LORDSHIP NEVER SAT EASY ON MY HEAD. MR VIMES KNOWS THE FEELING.

Vimes grinned. He'd met Death frequently in the course of work and had a respect for him.

"You _do_ know me, though". War stepped forwards. "You and me need a cosy fireside chat, my girl!"

"Hey, they've even got rancid yak butter here!" Lu-Tze observed, as he poured teas. "Somebody's gone to a lot of trouble over this!"

I ASKED RONNIE SOAK WHAT HISTORY MONKS USUALLY TAKE IN THEIR TEA. HE WAS KIND ENOUGH TO PROVIDE AND ASKED TO BE REMEMBERED TO YOU AFTER LAST TIME.

"Er… Death." Vimes said, searching for the right words.

YOU MAY SMOKE, COMMANDER. I'M HARDLY LIKELY TO COME OUT WITH AN ARGUMENT AGAINST, AM I?

"Thank you. But what I meant was… we have a prisoner here. We've just made an arrest. I just need to know whose jurisdiction am I handing her over to? Habaeus corpus, and all that."

SHE WILL REMAIN IN TEMPORARY CUSTODY HERE. SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, EXCEPT FOR MY COLLEAGUE WHO WILL VISIT AND SEEK TO PERSUADE HER OF THE ERROR OF HER WAYS. THERE ARE OTHERS I NEED TO SPEAK TO ABOUT THIS. THE DEATH OF THE ROUNDWORLD HAS BEEN INVITED, AS HE MAY HAVE VIEWS TO EXPRESS OVER THE TEMPORARY LOSS OF THREE OF HIS FOUR. HE WILL CERTAINLY HAVE VIEWS ABOUT AN OVER-ZEALOUS SUBORDINATE MAKING UN-NECESSARY WORK FOR HIM.

Carmine bowed her head. She looked suddenly afraid. Carrot finished removing her handcuffs.

"Prisoner exchanged between jurisdictions, sir!"

ULTIMATELY, AZRAEL, WHO IS LAST COURT OF APPEAL, WILL JUDGE. BUT I ANTICIPATE ROUNDWORLD WILL HAVE ITS FOUR AGAIN. SABLE AND WHITE WILL REINCORPORATE THEMSELVES, AND AT SOME POINT RED WILL BE RELEASED FROM MY CUSTODY. THAT IS HOW IT HAS TO BE – THE FOUR MUST RIDE, EVERYWHERE THERE ARE HUMANS. AND HUMANS GET INTO THE MOST SURPRISING PLACES.

"Thank you for the tea, sir." Vimes said.

YOU'RE WELCOME. CALL AGAIN, COMMANDER, WHEN YOU'RE PASSING. LU-TZE, ONE DAY WE MAY PLAY CHESS AGAIN!"

Accepting his dismissal, Vimes gathered his group together. He liked the American military uniform he'd been wearing – smart and practical. Ah well, back to the usual Watch motley…

HEX returned them to the HEM, to another huge round of applause.

Carrot nudged Vimes.

"Look, sir!"

On the Omniscope, the Roundworld had returned to normal, unthreatened by mantle plumes or nuclear meltdowns. It was bright and sunny over the north-eastern USA.

"Damn good job!" said Lu-Tze, approvingly. "We really need a machine like this."


	16. Epilogues

**Epilogues:-**

It had been a strained two or three months in the House of Death. First, his human servant Albert had complained about the bad dreams he'd been having, where a seductive female voice had whispered to him about the good old days when he was Archchancellor of the University and all were in fear of the Wizards. _Why did you stop, Albert? Is this any sort of life? Why not go back there, fight for what is rightfully yours, and then establish the University as rulers of Ankh-Morpork and then of the Disc?_

Albert had been shown scenes of righteous magical war, the rightful destruction of those fools who would not acknowledge his primacy as Leader, followed by his glorious triumph as Imperial Arch-Mage.

AND DO YOU WANT TO DO THIS, ALBERT? Death had inquired.

"At my time of life, sir? No! But the dreams keep getting' in there!"

Death considered. He asked contacts in the supernatural world. On one of his visits, War said "Dashed naughty of the gel. Poachin' on MY patch. Can't be havin' that! I'll talk to her. Though Albert's human. And she's a War. Only natural, Mort! Can't you get that grand-daughter of yours on the case? She's usually a calmin' influence on people who are gettin' a bit difficult!"

Death contemplated what a Susan whose humanity was corrupted by contact with Carmine Zuigiber might do to the Disc. No, he thought. I will not bring that about.

But a thought crossed his mind from his time spent filling in for the Hogfather. Somebody totally passive. Cheerful. Unshakeable…. Somebody on whom malice and anger and violence would just wash off, like water off a bird's back…

He grinned. Figuratively, at least. Then went to talk to a contact.

Carmine Zuigiber screamed. Her new jailer put the food tray down and smiled, benevolently.

"Eat it all up, dear. You'll feel so much better! And I thought after lunch we could play charades, isn't that nice?"

The bluebird sang a song of peace and happiness. The dumpy, middle-aged, Happiness Fairy radiated warm benevolence. It blanketed out the negative waves emanating from Carmine Zuigiber and, when it touched her, made her recoil in shuddering loathing.

She opened the curtains and looked out over Death's Domain.

"It's turned out nice again, hasn't it?"

Inside, Carmine Zuigiber screamed. And screamed. And screamed.

XXXXXXXXX

_**Three Mile Island. Some years later.**_

In the ruined reactor 2, strange lights are glowing in the middle of another moonless night. Locals are used to this and barely bat an eyelid, passing by with the usual Pennsylvanian stoicism. A rumour has spread that the nuclear power plant, now decommissioned as surplus to requirements, was built on an old Red Indian burial ground. This explains not only the eldritch red and electric blue lights in the sky, but the bad medicine that was there from the start and which caused the white man's fire factory to uncontrollably explode. Nobody explores there. The place is very scrupulously left well alone. Which is just as well, considering.

This suited the entities who are meeting in there. To them, it's neutral ground. The discussion is attended by some very high-up people and their Earthly representatives. It is chaired by one who considers himself neutral, neither the creation of nor in the pay of Heaven or Hell. He, the Death of the Roundworld, just _is. _He treats the two dignitaries with the appropriate respect, but is beholden to neither, and they know it.

INQUIRIES ARE CONTINUING. He said. IT IS UNDERSTOOD THAT MY THREE SUBORDINATES BECAME IMPATIENT. THEY WENT ROGUE AND SOUGHT TO INITIATE THE APOCALYPSE OF THEIR OWN VOLITION, WITHOUT WAITING FOR THE SIGNS AND PORTENTS THAT BOTH HEAVEN AND HELL SHALL GIVE WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT.

_I HOPE THEY WILL BE DIZZCIPLINED! _ Beelzebub spoke out of a pillar of red flame.

_What do you propose to do about it? _The Metatron haughtily demanded, from the parallel pillar of electric-blue flame. _It's this sort of behaviour that makes the Apocalypse into a laughing stock._

Death shrugged. TWO OF THE FOUR WERE DISCORPORATED AND ARE BEYOND MY REACH AS YET. BUT THEY WILL RETURN. THEY WILL BE… RETRAINED. THE THIRD WAS IMPRISONED AND TAKEN OUT OF THE CIRCLES OF THIS WORLD, FOR A SPACE. SHE IS BEING BOTH PUNISHED FOR HER OVER-ENTHUSIASM AND BEING RETRAINED.

_THE TIME IZZ SOON WHEN THEY WILL BE NEEDED AGAIN IN THIZZ WORLD. OUR FATHER BELOW IZZ CONZIDERING THE ANTICHRIZT. CROWLEY, IZ IT TOO COLD FOR YOU IN HERE? THAT CAN BE REMEDIED!_

"No, Lord!" the demon hastily said, suppressing another shudder.

_And you too, Aziraphile? I find it strange that you two were as effectual as a snowball in Hell in this past crisis. By your own report, you kept arriving at flash-points just too late and discovered some other force had intervened before you could. To set things straight. This bothers me, Aziraphile._

ME ALZZO. THE IDEA OF A THIRD FORCE ACTIVE IN THE EVENTZ OF THIZ PLANET, WHICH IS ZYMPATHETIC TO THE WRETCHED HUMANS, IZ A CONZERN TO HELL.

_The idea of a third force active in the interests of this planet, acting without reference to Heaven or Hell, is a concern to us too._ agreed the Metatron.

Perhaps" mused Crowley, "it's all a part of the Great Ineffable Plan. Every time it looks the Plan is going to get well and truly effed, and we can't ineff it, this is like the last failsafe mechanism"

He paused, not appreciating the look Beelzebub was giving him.

"So the third force may well be the Ineffable!" said Aziraphale. "Has anyone seen Him lately?"

The Metatron had the good grace to look shifty. Crowley seized on the moment.

"Has anyone seen Him _at all_?" he ventured. "When I was last in Heaven and all this down here was just… void… we all remember the Face of the Ineffable, right, looming over us, with the big white beard and everything. And the Hand of the Creator, reaching in and wiggling his fingers about, and everything started then. But he's been a bit conspicuous by his absence then, hasn't he?"

_It may be wisest_ said the Metatron to end this meeting. _Thank you for your co-operation, gentlemen. _

THANK YOU, BROTHER. WE DON'T ZEE NEARLY ENOUGH OF EACH OTHER THESE DAYZ.

_Not since that temptation on the mountain. You nearly had me there, bro!_

Beelzebub laughed, then remembered. CROWLEY? I ABZOLUTELY FORBID YOU TO INVESTIGATE THIS MATTER OF A "THIRD FORZE" ANY MORE. THE BOOK IZ CLOSED!"

And the two faded out. Death nodded to the angel and demon, then followed.

"_Brothers_?" said Crowley.

"Brothers." Aziraphale said, firmly. "In the Rosicrucian doctrine, the energy of the Metatron is the energy that was incarnated as the Second Person of The Trinity. He's an aspect of…."

"Bloody hell! I ran into Him in Palestine. I was pignapping a herd near Gaderene. Up He comes, recognises a Demon, runs me and six hundred pigs over the top of a cliff. Stung a bit. But the laugh's on Him, as he doesn't stop to consider what six hundred pigs are doing in Jewish Israel in the first place. Not much call for pork produce., usually. But the Roman soldiers who've just seen a year's meat ration do a Lemming aren't exactly happy, are they? The moment they feel His collar, He gets more of a beating-up than duty calls for. "

"Crowley, you're a bastard."

"Never claimed to be anything else, Angel. But doesn't it just suggest to you that there's another layer to all this yet, higher than Heaven and Hell and capable of over-riding both?"

"There is. It's the Ineffable."

"Wherever He is!."

An immeasurable distance away, the Dean of Unseen University felt his left ear tingle, a sure sign somebody was talking about him. He shrugged, and set to his lunch with renewed vigour.

_**Meanwhile, in Roundworld:-**_

In the temporary absence of the three Riders, many things in the world changed for the better. It took a while for the baleful influence of War, Famine and Pollution to fade, and in fact there were wars. But these were the last overs of dying conflicts, as in Vietnam's brief – and last - war with China, or the last convulsions of an already dead Empire, as in Britain's war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands.

As the 1980's grew longer, and War's exclusion from the world grew longer, even the gulf between East and West that had been set in stone in 1945 began to crumble. By the early 1990's, the wall had fallen, the barriers were coming down, and the awful spectre of nuclear war had been lifted from Europe.

Famines still happened, but with Sable in limbo, the human response to them changed and there was a genuine determination to prevent an abomination like Ethiopia happening again. With Pollution temporarily gone, there was an equal determination in the world to clean up the environment.

The world enjoyed a break from the Three – by the early 1990's there were even truces in backward parts of Europe normally marked by extreme hate and mistrust between neighbours, like the Balkans and Northern Ireland, where Carmine Zuigiber's intervention was generally un-necessary.

But they were back. They had to be back. soon, as Hell had the Big One ready to go. **{Now go to "**_**Good Omens**_**", co-authored by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, in which Armageddon almost happens to Roundworld} **

_**Wiltshire, England, 1979. **_

He is employed as a Press Officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board. He is working late at home, reading through the various press-releases and official reports released in the wake of the Three Mile Island near-disaster. While he works for the nuclear power industry, he is no Rijnswand or Zweiblumen, the trouble-shooter who would go in there and seek to prevent catastrophe: his job begin after theirs has finished. In some respects it is viewed as more important; he is responsible for drafting the press releases to be issued to ITV, the BBC, and to the press, the ones which assure a jittery public that while there have been unscheduled events at Windscale or Dungeness or Trawsfynnydd, there is absolutely nothing to worry about.

Such minor events of breakaway oxidisation phenomena as have occurred are relatively minor, and in no way merit comparison with the recent more serious event at Three Mile Island. In any case, that was the Americans and they do things in a less methodical and rather more slapdash way than we stolid British.

He puts down the American report with a sigh, pushes back his glasses, and rubs his eyes.

He has had two books published so far, one science-fiction, and one fantasy fiction. Both sold reasonably well but neither has gone into a second print. The money was handy, but not enough to enable him to live the dream, pack in an increasingly pointless – and after Three Mile Island, he now suspects _mendacious_ - day job, and live full-time on the proceeds of his own writing.

As if providing him with the means of escape from a prosaic day job, his dreams have been interesting. He has dreamt of a turtle, swimming through space. Bizarrely, on its back were four elephants. And on top of the elephants, supported by their shoulders… something. He can never quite make it out.

For something different, he picks up the copy of the Children's Encyclopedia they have bought for their infant daughter. He opens it at random. And blinks.

There it is. The turtle and the elephants. And supported on their backs… the world. A flat Earth. The caption notes that this is the ancient Hindu picture of cosmology, shared in greater or lesser respects across three continents…

The journalist and would-be full time author stares at it, entranced, as ideas and pictures begin to form. He tugs thoughtfully at his full black beard. His coffee goes cold. But the ideas stay hot. This is the material for his third novel. A flat earth. What a twist for a sci-fi story.

HEX regards Terence David John Pratchett thoughtfully. For his own interest, and to confirm his suspicions, he follows a few years up Pratchett's timeline. He opens a file, as yet for his own interest and not that of the Wizards.

++TERRENCE DAVID JOHN PRATCHETT++

++28th APRIL 1948++

++BEACONSFIELD++

++ENGLAND++

The file has only three words

++RECURSION IS COMPLETE++


End file.
